Related papers: Metabolic scaling in small life forms
In this work we upscale a prototypical kinetic transport equation which models a cell population moving in a fibrous environment with a chemo- or haptotactic signal influencing both the direction and the magnitude of the cell velocity. The…
The development of multicellular organisms proceeds through a series of morphogenetic and cell-state transitions, transforming homogeneous zygotes into complex adults by a process of self-organization. Many of these transitions are achieved…
Most physical and other natural systems are complex entities composed of a large number of interacting individual elements. It is a surprising fact that they often obey the so-called scaling laws relating an observable quantity with a…
The metabolic activity of microbes has played an essential role in the evolution and persistence of life on Earth. Microbial metabolism plays a primary role in the flow of carbon, nitrogen and other elements through the biosphere on a…
Many of the chemical reactions that take place within a living cell are irreversible. Due to evolutionary pressures, the number of allowable reactions within these systems are highly constrained and thus the resulting metabolic networks…
It is suggested that the degree distribution for networks of the cell-metabolism for simple organisms reflects an ubiquitous randomness. This implies that natural selection has exerted no or very little pressure on the network degree…
A major goal of modern computational biology is to simulate the collective behaviour of large cell populations starting from the intricate web of molecular interactions occurring at the microscopic level. In this paper we describe a…
Metabolic fluxes in cells are governed by physical, physiological, and economic principles. Here I assume an optimal allocation of enzyme resources and postulate a general principle for metabolism: each enzyme must convert less valuable…
The dynamics of active matter driven by interacting molecular motors has a non-potential structure at the local scale. However, we show that there exists a quasi-potential effectively describing the collective self-organization of the…
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…
Life systems are complex and hierarchical, with diverse components at different scales, yet they sustain themselves, grow, and evolve over time. How can a theory of such complex biological states be developed? Here we note that for a…
Bistability is considered wide-spread among bacteria and eukaryotic cells, useful e.g. for enzyme induction, bet hedging, and epigenetic switching. However, this phenomenon has mostly been described with deterministic dynamic or well-mixed…
The organization of live cells into tissues and their subsequent biological function involves inter-cell mechanical interactions, which are mediated by their elastic environment. To model this interaction, we consider cells as spherical…
Efficient energy transduction is one driver of evolution; and thus understanding biomolecular energy transduction is crucial to understanding living organisms. As an energy-orientated modelling methodology, bond graphs provide a useful…
Biological cells are able to adapt their behaviour in response to environmental cues. Durotaxis is a phenomenon in which cells adjust their migration depending on the mechanical properties of a surrounding substrate. Although durotaxis has…
Various rod-shaped bacteria such as the canonical gram negative Escherichia coli or the well-studied gram positive Bacillus subtilis divide symmetrically after they approximately double their volume. Their size at division is not constant,…
In this work it is shown that scale free tails in metabolic flux distributions inferred from realistic large scale models can be simply an artefact due to reactions involved in thermodynamically unfeasible cycles, that are unbounded by…
Fluctuations in the abundance of molecules in the living cell may affect its growth and well being. For regulatory molecules (e.g., signaling proteins or transcription factors), fluctuations in their expression can affect the levels of…
The group of large aquatic mammals has representatives being the largest living beings on earth, surpassing the weight and size of dinosaurs. In this paper, we present some empirical evidence and a mathematical model to argue that fat…
Brain is one of the most energy demanding organs in mammals, and its total metabolic rate scales with brain volume raised to a power of around 5/6. This value is significantly higher than the more common exponent 3/4 relating whole body…