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Mathematical models of stem cell differentiation are commonly based upon the concept of subsequent cell fate decisions, each controlled by a gene regulatory network. These networks exhibit a multistable behavior and cause the system to…
Mammalian cells are restricted from proliferating indefinitely. Telomeres at the end of each chromosome are shortened at cell division and, when they reach a critical length, the cell will enter permanent cell cycle arrest - a state known…
Regulation of cell proliferation is a crucial aspect of tissue development and homeostasis and plays a major role in morphogenesis, wound healing, and tumor invasion. A phenomenon of such regulation is contact inhibition, which describes…
A big challenge in current biology is to understand the exact self-organization mechanism underlying complex multi-physics coupling developmental processes. With multiscale computations of from subcellular gene expressions to cell…
Cell colonies of bacteria, tumour cells and fungi, under nutrient limited growth conditions, exhibit complex branched growth patterns. In order to investigate this phenomenon we present a simple hybrid cellular automaton model of cell…
Investigations of natural variation in cell mechanics within a cell population are essential to understand the stochastic nature of soft-network deformation. Striking commonalities have been found concerning the average values and…
Cells forming various epithelial tissues have a strikingly universal distribution for the number of their edges. It is generally assumed that this topological feature is predefined by the statistics of individual cell divisions in growing…
Bone marrow stromal cells (BMSC) -- which include skeletal stem cells -- are a promising tool in regenerative medicine. However, their heterogeneous and unpredictable in vivo behaviour remains a critical barrier preventing the development…
Over the last two decades, scientific literature has been blooming with various means of simulating epithelial cell colonies. Each of these simulations can be separated by their respective efficiency (expressed in terms of consumed…
To maintain homeostasis, living cells process information with networks of interacting molecules. Traditional models for cellular information processing have focused on networks of chemical reactions between molecules. Here, we describe how…
Systemic properties of living cells are the result of molecular dynamics governed by so-called genetic regulatory networks (GRN). These networks capture all possible features of cells and are responsible for the immense levels of adaptation…
Cell invasion and spatial pattern formation are two distinct manifestations of cellular self-organisation in development, regeneration, and disease. Here, we develop and analyse a unified theoretical framework that links these two seemingly…
Cell polarization and directional cell migration can display random, persistent and oscillatory dynamic patterns. However, it is not clear if these polarity patterns can be explained by the same underlying regulatory mechanism. Here, we…
Many morphogenetic processes involve mechanical rearrangement of epithelial tissues that is driven by precisely regulated cytoskeletal forces and cell adhesion. The mechanical state of the cell and intercellular adhesion are not only the…
Cell sorting, the segregation of cells with different properties into distinct domains, is a key phenomenon in biological processes such as embryogenesis. We use a phase-field model of a confluent cell layer to study the role of activity in…
We model an enclosed system of bacteria, whose motility-induced phase separation is coupled to slow population dynamics. Without noise, the system shows both static phase separation and a limit cycle, in which a rising global population…
The feedback between mechanical and chemical signals plays a key role in controlling many biological processes and collective cell behavior. Here we focus on the emergence of spatiotemporal density waves in a one-dimensional "cell train."…
Erythropoiesis is a mechanism for the production of red blood cells by cellular differentiation. It is based on amplification steps due to an interplay between renewal and differentiation in the successive cell compartments from stem cells…
Multicellular organisms comprise a diverse collection of stable tissues built from different cell types. It remains unclear how large numbers of interacting cells can precisely coordinate their gene expression during tissue…
How the cells break symmetry and organize their edge activity to move directionally is a fun- damental question in cell biology. Physical models of cell motility commonly rely on gradients of regulatory factors and/or feedback from the…