Related papers: Separation of ionic timescales explains dynamics o…
A biophysical issue how the nuclear size dynamically scales with the cellular size remains mysterious. We develop a theoretical framework in which the interactions between polydisperse biomolecules and the mechanical elasticity of the cell…
Homeostatic control of cell volume and intracellular electrolyte content is a fundamental problem in physiology and is central to the functioning of epithelial systems. These physiological processes are modeled using pump-leak models, a…
Cells modify their volume in response to changes in osmotic pressure but it is usually assumed that other active shape variations do not involve significant volume fluctuations. Here we report experiments demonstrating that water transport…
Epithelial cells regulate ion concentrations and volume through coordinated membrane pumps, ion channels, and paracellular pathways which can be modeled by classical single-compartment pump-leak equations (PLEs). Many epithelial functions,…
Droplet formation has emerged as an essential concept for the spatiotemporal organisation of biomolecules in cells. However, classical descriptions of droplet dynamics based on passive liquid-liquid phase separation cannot capture the…
Cells achieve size homeostasis by regulating their division timing based on their size, added size, and cell cycle time. Previous research under steady-state conditions demonstrated the robustness of these mechanisms. However, their dynamic…
Biomolecular condensates are small droplets forming spontaneously in biological cells via phase separation. They play a role in many cellular processes, but it is unclear how cells control them. Cellular regulation often relies on…
Molecular dynamics simulations are typically constrained to have a fixed number of particles, which limits our capability to simulate chemical and physical processes where the composition of the system changes during the simulation time.…
Biological cells use droplets to separate components and spatially control their interior. Experiments demonstrate that the complex, crowded cellular environment affects the droplet arrangement and their sizes. To understand this behavior,…
A cellular bleb grows when a portion of the cell membrane detaches from the underlying cortex under the influence of a cytoplasmic pressure. We develop a quantitative model for the growth and dynamics of these objects in a simple…
We present investigations on volume regulation and beading shape transitions in PC12 neurites conducted using a flow-chamber technique. By disrupting the cell cytoskeleton with specific drugs we investigate the role of its individual…
The origin of the dramatic changes in the behavior of liquids as they approach their vitreous state - increases of many orders of magnitude in transport properties and dynamic time scales - is a major unsolved problem in condensed matter.…
Constant-pressure molecular-dynamics simulations of phospholipid membranes in the fluid phase reveal strong correlations between equilibrium fluctuations of volume and energy on the nanosecond time-scale. The existence of strong…
Droplets are essential for spatially controlling biomolecules in cells. To work properly, cells need to control the emergence and morphology of droplets. On the one hand, driven chemical reactions can affect droplets profoundly. For…
The large scale behaviour of a population of cells that grow and interact through the concentration field of the chemicals they secrete is studied using dynamical renormalization group methods. The combination of the effective long-range…
Biological cells exhibit a hierarchical spatial organization, where various compartments harbor condensates that form by phase separation. Cells can control the emergence of these condensates by affecting compartment size, the amount of the…
A ubiquitous feature of living cells is their growth over time followed by division into daughter cells. How isogenic cell populations maintain size homeostasis, i.e., a narrow distribution of cell size, is an intriguing fundamental…
We study the effect of correlations in generation times on the dynamics of population growth of microorganisms. We show that any non-zero correlation that is due to cell-size regulation, no matter how small, induces long-term oscillations…
Molecular dynamics simulations require barostats to be performed at constant pressure. The usual recipe is to employ the Berendsen barostat first, which displays a first-order volume relaxation efficient in equilibration but results in…
Quantitative single cell measurements have shown that cell cycle duration (the time between cell divisions) for diverse cell types is a noisy variable. The underlying distribution is mean scalable with a universal shape for many cell types…