Related papers: Resonance for life: Metabolism and Social Interact…
By creating networks of biochemical pathways, communities of micro-organisms are able to modulate the properties of their environment and even the metabolic processes within their hosts. Next-generation high-throughput sequencing has led to…
Social isolation is caused by the impoverishment of community (atomism) and fragmentation is caused by the enlargement of in-group (mobism), both of which can be viewed as social problems related to communication. To solve these problems,…
The rise in the availability of bacterial genomes defines a need for synthesis: abstracting from individual taxa, to see larger patterns of bacterial lifestyles across systems. A key concept for such synthesis in ecology is the niche, the…
Population dynamics deals with the collective phenomena of living organisms, and it has attracted much attention since it is expected to explain how not only living organisms but also human beings have been adapted to varying environments.…
Cells grown in culture act as a model system for analyzing the effects of anticancer compounds, which may affect cell behavior in a cell cycle position-dependent manner. Cell synchronization techniques have been generally employed to…
Active agents - like phoretic particles, bacteria, sperm, and cytoskeletal filaments in motility assays - show a large variety of motility-induced collective behaviors, such as aggregation, clustering and phase separation. The behavior of…
The human habitat is a host where microbial species evolve, function, and continue to evolve. Elucidating how microbial communities respond to human habitats is a fundamental and critical task, as establishing baselines of human microbiome…
Bacterial conglomerates such as biofilms and microcolonies are ubiquitous in nature and play an important role in industry and medicine. In contrast to well-mixed, diluted cultures routinely used in microbial research, bacteria in a…
Multicellular organisms comprise a diverse collection of stable tissues built from different cell types. It remains unclear how large numbers of interacting cells can precisely coordinate their gene expression during tissue…
There are numerous scenarios in which populations of cells migrate in crowded environments. Typical examples include wound healing, cancer growth and embryo development. In these crowded environments cells are able to interact with each…
How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…
The formation and dissociation of specific noncovalent interactions between a variety of macromolecules play a crucial role in the function of biological systems. During the last few years, three main lines of research led to a dramatic…
Our planet is roughly closed to matter, but open to energy input from the sun. However, to harness this energy, organisms must transform matter from one chemical (redox) state to another. For example, photosynthetic organisms can capture…
Living organisms rely on molecular networks, such as gene circuits and signaling pathways, for information processing and robust decision-making in crowded, noisy environments. Recent advances show that interacting biomolecules…
A large variety of microorganisms produce molecules to communicate via complex signaling mechanisms such as quorum sensing and chemotaxis. The biological diversity is enormous, but synthetic inanimate colloidal microswimmers mimic…
Bacterial communities have rich social lives. A well-established interaction involves the exchange of a public good in Pseudomonas populations, where the iron-scavenging compound pyoverdine, synthesized by some cells, is shared with the…
A model of clustering dynamics is proposed for a population of spatially distributed active rotators. A transition from excitable to oscillatory dynamics is induced by the increase of the local density of active rotators. It is interpreted…
Cells constantly need to monitor the state of the environment to detect changes and timely respond. The detection of concentration changes of a ligand by a set of receptors can be cast as a problem of hypothesis testing, and the cell viewed…
We study the problem of how a ``living'' system complex in structure can respond perfectly to local changes in the environment. Such a system is assumed to consist of a distributed ``living'' medium and a hierarchical ``supplying'' network…
Microorganisms like bacteria can sense concentration of chemo-attractants in its medium very accurately. They achieve this through interaction between the receptors on their cell surface and the chemo-attractant molecules (like sugar). But…