Related papers: Binding and dimerization control phase separation …
Active forces occurring within cells can drive crucial biological processes that involve spontaneous organization and shape change, such as cell division. Motivated by recent in vitro experiments of nematic droplets of cytoskeletal…
In multicellular organisms, several cell states coexist. For determining each cell type, cell-cell interactions are often essential, in addition to intracellular gene expression dynamics. Based on dynamical systems theory, we propose a…
This article presents a physical biology approach to understanding organization and segregation of bacterial chromosomes. The author uses a "piston" analogy for bacterial chromosomes in a cell, which leads to a phase diagram for the…
Native membranes of biological cells display melting transitions of their lipids at a temperature of 10-20 degrees below body temperature. Such transitions can be observed in various bacterial cells, in nerves, in cancer cells, but also in…
Liquid-liquid phase separation is the mechanism underlying the formation of biomolecular condensates. Disordered protein regions often drive phase separation, but molecular interactions of disordered protein regions are not well understood,…
Biomolecular condensates are liquid- or gel-like droplets of proteins and nucleic acids formed at least in part through liquid-liquid phase separation. Condensates enable diverse functions of cells and the pathogens that infect them,…
In bacterial populations, cells are able to cooperate in order to yield complex collective functionalities. Interest in population-level cellular behaviour is increasing, due to both our expanding knowledge of the underlying biological…
In many adult tissues, stem cells and differentiated cells are not homogeneously distributed : stem cells are arranged in periodic "niches", and differentiated cells are constantly produced and migrate out of these niches. In this article,…
A model of the urban agglomeration and segregation is formulated, in which two types of agents move around on the square-lattice aligned cells. The model is shown to exhibit, when the density of agents are varied as the control parameter,…
Biological tissues transform between solid-like and liquid-like states in many fundamental physiological events. Recent experimental observations further suggest that in two-dimensional epithelial tissues these solid-liquid transformations…
Biological membranes mainly consist of lipids and proteins. While the proteins have many functions as single molecules, the membrane as a whole displays physical properties that cannot be explained on the single molecule level. For example,…
The ability to control the crystallization behaviour (including its absence) of particles, be they biomolecules such as globular proteins, inorganic colloids, nanoparticles, or metal atoms in an alloy, is of both fundamental and…
Neurons regulate the distribution of signaling components across an extended tree-like cellular structure using both local and global feedback control. This is hypothesized to allow homeostatic control of the electrical activity of a neuron…
Mechanical forces influence the dynamics of growing tissues. Computer simulations are employed to study the importance of interfacial effects in tissue competition. It was speculated that mechanical pressure determines the competition,…
Phase-separated biomolecular condensates containing proteins and RNAs can assemble into higher-order structures by forming thermodynamically stable interfaces between immiscible phases. Using a minimal model of a protein/RNA interaction…
Recent advances in high-resolution experimental methods have highlighted the significance of cell signal pathway crosstalk and localised signalling activity in the development and disease of numerous biological systems. The investigation of…
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…
Plasma membranes appear as deformable systems wherein molecules are free to move and diffuse giving rise to condensed microdomains (composed of ordered lipids, transmembrane proteins and cholesterol) surrounded by disordered lipid…
The work is devoted to the analysis of cell population dynamics where cells make a choice between differentiation and apoptosis. This choice is based on the values of intracellular proteins whose concentrations are described by a system of…
As cells grow and divide under a given environment, they become crowded and resources are limited, as seen in bacterial biofilms and multicellular aggregates. These cells often show strong interactions through exchanging chemicals, as in…