Related papers: Multicellular self-organization in Escherichia col…
Rod-shaped bacteria, such as Escherichia coli, commonly live forming mounded colonies. They initially grow two-dimensionally on a surface and finally achieve three-dimensional growth. While it was recently reported that three-dimensional…
Bacterial colonies growing on surfaces are shaped by mechanical stresses transmitted through the community, governed by the balance between cell growth and steric and cell-substrate interactions. Using overdamped dynamics simulations of…
We investigate the effect of cooperative interactions in an ensemble of microorganisms, modelled as self-propelled disk-like and rod-like particles, in a three-dimensional turbulent flow to show flocking as an emergent phenomenon. Building…
The study of biological cells in terms of mesoscopic, nonequilibrium, nonlinear, stochastic dynamics of open chemical systems provides a paradigm for other complex, self-organizing systems with ultra-fast stochastic fluctuations, short-time…
Cooperation is prevalent in nature, not only in the context of social interactions within the animal kingdom, but also on the cellular level. In cancer for example, tumour cells can cooperate by producing growth factors. The evolution of…
The proper functioning of multicellular organisms requires the robust establishment of precise proportions between distinct cell-types. This developmental differentiation process typically involves intracellular regulatory and stochastic…
Based on symmetry consideration of migration and shape deformations, we formulate phenomenologically the dynamics of cell crawling in two dimensions. Forces are introduced to change the cell shape. The shape deformations induce migration of…
Emergence of regular spatial patterns is a hallmark in living matter ranging from subcellular organelles to developing embryos and to ecosystems. Mechanisms for the formation of ordered spatial patterns in biology often require chemical…
We developed a mechanical model of spermatozoal swimming in bulk suspensions. We traced the spatiotemporal elastohydrodynamic interactions and found that spermatozoa engaged in self-organisation: flagellar undulatory motion generated a…
We present a modelling framework for the dynamics of cells structured by the concentration of a micromolecule they contain. We derive general equations for the evolution of the cell population and of the extra-cellular concentration of the…
Anisotropic macromolecules exposed to non-equilibrium (active) noise are very common in biological systems, and an accurate understanding of their anisotropic dynamics is therefore crucial. Here, we experimentally investigate the dynamics…
Self organization mechanisms are essential for the cytoskeleton to adapt to the requirements of living cells. They rely on the intricate interplay of cytoskeletal filaments, crosslinking proteins and molecular motors. Here we present an in…
We demonstrate diversification rather than optimisation for highly interacting organisms in a well mixed biological system by means of a simple model and reference to experiment, and find the cause to be the complex network of interactions…
The spatial structure of the cell is highly organized at all levels: from small complexes and assemblies, to local nano- and micro-clusters, to global, micrometer scales across and between cells. We suggest that this multiscale spatial cell…
Standard models of population dynamics focus on the the interaction, survival, and extinction of the competing species individually. Real ecological systems, however, are characterized by an abundance of species (or strategies, in the…
The evolution of multicellularity was a major transition in the history of life on earth. Conditions under which multicellularity is favored have been studied theoretically and experimentally. But since the construction of a multicellular…
We demonstrate 'differential dynamic microscopy' (DDM) for the fast, high throughput characterization of the dynamics of active particles. Specifically, we characterize the swimming speed distribution and the fraction of motile cells in…
Collective motion of cells is critical to some of the most vital tasks including wound healing, development, and immune response [Friedl and Gilmour 2009; Tokarski et al. 2012; Lee et al. 2012; Beltman et al. 2009], and is common to many…
Based on extensive study of a dynamical systems model of the development of a cell society, a novel theory for stem cell differentiation and its regulation is proposed as the ``chaos hypothesis''. Two fundamental features of stem cell…
This paper presents an interesting experimental example of voter-model statistics in biology. In recent work on mouse tail-skin, where proliferating cells are confined to a two-dimensional layer, we showed that cells proliferate and…