Related papers: Metabolic scaling in small life forms

Natural selection has shaped the evolution of cells and multi-cellular organisms such that social cooperation can often be preferred over an individualistic approach to metabolic regulation. This paper extends a framework for dynamic…

Metabolism displays striking and robust regularities in the forms of modularity and hierarchy, whose composition may be compactly described. This renders metabolic architecture comprehensible as a system, and suggests the order in which…

Social interaction between microbes can be described at many levels of details, ranging from the biochemistry of cell-cell interactions to the ecological dynamics of populations. Choosing the best level to model microbial communities…

We provide a non-equilibrium thermodynamic description of the life-cycle of a droplet based, chemically feasible, system of protocells. By coupling the protocells metabolic kinetics with its thermodynamics, we demonstrate how the system can…

Biological patterns generated during development and regeneration often scale with organism size. Some organisms, e.g., flatworms, can regenerate a rescaled body plan from tissue fragments of varying sizes. Inspired by these examples, we…

Biological systems operate under simultaneous energetic and informational constraints, yet direct evidence that such constraints shape real metabolic networks is limited. The Network-Weighted Action Principle predicts that networks under…

We study a minimal model of a crawling eukaryotic cell with a chemical polarity controlled by a reaction-diffusion mechanism describing Rho GTPase dynamics. The size, shape, and speed of the cell emerge from the combination of the chemical…

Cell cultures exhibit rich and complex behaviors driven by dynamic metabolic interactions among cells. In this work, we present a model that captures these interactions through a framework inspired by statistical mechanics. Using Monte…

Metabolic pathways are fundamental maps in biochemistry that detail how molecules are transformed through various reactions. The complexity of metabolic network, where a single compound can play a part in multiple pathways, poses a…

Experiments have found that diffusion in metabolically active cells is much faster than in dormant cells, especially for large particles. However, the mechanism of this size-dependent diffusion enhancement in living cells is still unclear.…

Metabolic pathways describe chains of enzymatic reactions. Their modelling is a key point to understand living systems. An enzymatic reaction is an interaction between one or several metabolites (substrates) and an enzyme (simple protein or…

Biological systems perform an astonishing array of dynamical processes -- including development and repair, regulation, behavior and motor control, sensing and signaling, and adaptation, among others. Powered by the transduction of stored…

Life relies on a sophisticated metabolic molecular machinery that turns over high-energy molecules to evolve complex macromolecules and assemblies. At the molecular origin of life, such machinery was absent, implying the need for simple yet…

The building of minimal self-reproducing systems with a physical embodiment (generically called protocells) is a great challenge, with implications for both theory and applied sciences. Although the classical view of a living protocell…

Elastically-driven motion has been used as a strategy to achieve high speeds in small organisms and engineered micro-robotic devices. We examine the size-scaling relations determining the limit of elastic energy release from elastomer bands…

Understanding the mechanisms of interactions within cells, tissues, and organisms is crucial to driving developments across biology and medicine. Mathematical modeling is an essential tool for simulating biological systems and revealing…

Segregation of different cell types is a crucial process for the pattern formation in tissues, in particular during embryogenesis. Since the involved cell interactions are complex and difficult to measure individually in experiments,…

Microbes produce metabolic resources that are important for cell growth yet leak across membranes into the extracellular environment. Other microbes in the same environment can use these resources and adjust their own metabolic production…

Cell-cell adhesion plays a vital role in the development and maintenance of multicellular organisms. One of its functions is regulation of cell migration, such as occurs, e.g. during embryogenesis or in cancer. In this work, we develop a…

Biological systems are governed by coupled interactions between intracellular metabolism and bioreactor operation that span multiple time scales. Constraint-based metabolic models are widely used to describe intracellular metabolism, but…