Related papers: Physical models of bacterial chromosomes
Much of our mechanistic understanding of the functions of biological macromolecules is based on static structural experiments, which can be modelled either as single structures or conformational ensembles. While these provide us with…
Bacterial microcompartments are large, roughly icosahedral shells that assemble around enzymes and reactants involved in certain metabolic pathways in bacteria. Motivated by microcompartment assembly, we use coarse-grained computational and…
Chromosome organisation is increasingly recognised as an essential component of genome regulation, cell fate and cell health. Within the realm of transposable elements (TEs) however, the spatial information of how genomes are folded is…
We introduce a general theoretical framework to study the shape dynamics of actively growing and remodeling surfaces. Using this framework we develop a physical model for growing bacterial cell walls and study the interplay of cell shape…
In multicellular organisms, relations among parts and between parts and the whole are contextual and interdependent. These organisms and their cells are ontogenetically linked: an organism starts as a cell that divides producing…
We employ the diffusing transcription factors model for numerical simulation of chromatin topology conformations and transcriptional processes of human chromatin. Simulations of a short chromatin filament reveal different possible pathways…
A prominent organizational feature of bacterial chromosomes was revealed by Hi-C experiments, indicating anomalously high contacts between the left and right chromosomal arms. These long-range contacts have been attributed to various…
We introduce various models for cellulose bio-degradation by micro-organisms. Those models rely on complex chemical mechanisms, involve the structure of the cellulose chains and are allowed to depend on the phenotypical traits of the…
We present a statistical mechanics approach to the protein folding problem. We first review some of the basic properties of proteins, and introduce some physical models to describe their thermodynamics. These models rely on a random…
Essential life processes take place across multiple space and time scales in living organisms but understanding their mechanistic interactions remains an ongoing challenge. Advanced multiscale modeling techniques are providing new…
Bacteria are easily characterizable model organisms with an impressively complicated set of capabilities. Among their capabilities is quorum sensing, a detailed cell-cell signaling system that may have a common origin with eukaryotic…
The molecular machinery of life is largely created via self-organisation of individual molecules into functional assemblies. Minimal coarse-grained models, where a whole macromolecule is represented by a small number of particles, can be of…
Ribosomes are critical biomolecular nanomachines responsible for protein synthesis in all known organisms. The function and dynamics of ribosomes can be studied using molecular dynamics computer simulations. Although this task remains…
To model the morphogenesis of rod-shaped bacterial micro-colony, several individual-based models have been proposed in the biophysical literature. When studying the shape of micro-colonies, most models present interaction forces such as…
Advances in synthetic biology allow us to engineer bacterial collectives with pre-specified characteristics. However, the behavior of these collectives is difficult to understand, as cellular growth and division as well as extra-cellular…
This study explores the application of elongated particle interaction models, traditionally used in liquid crystal phase research, in the context of early bacterial biofilm development. Through computer simulations using an agent-based…
The chromosome is a key player of cell physiology, and its dynamics provides valuable information about its physical organization. In both prokaryotes and eukaryotes, the short-time motion of chromosomal loci has been described as a Rouse…
Systems biology and whole-cell modelling are demanding increasingly comprehensive mathematical models of cellular biochemistry. These models require the development of simplified models of specific processes which capture essential…
Bacteria are highly adaptive microorganisms that thrive in a wide range of growth conditions via changes in cell morphologies and macromolecular composition. How bacterial morphologies are regulated in diverse environmental conditions is a…
The coil-globule transition of hetero-polymer chains is studied here. By means of extensive Molecular Dynamics simulations, we show that the transition is directly linked to the complexity of the chain, which depends on the number of…