Related papers: Eph-ephrin-mediated differential persistence as a …
Cycling tissues such as the intestinal epithelium, germ line, and hair follicles, require a constant flux of differentiated cells. These tissues are maintained by a population of stem cells, which generate differentiated progenies and…
In higher organisms, all cells share the same genome, but every cell expresses only a limited and specific set of genes that defines the cell type. During cell division, not only the genome, but also the cell type is inherited by the…
Epithelial morphogenesis, a signature problem of tissue biology and tissue mechanics, continues to inspire biologists and physicists alike. Many treatments focus on tissue fluidization, apical/basal ratio changes, or mechanical…
Living tissues experience various external forces on cells, influencing their behaviour, physiology, shape, gene expression, and destiny through interactions with their environment. Despite much research done in this area, challenges remain…
In complex systems, groups of interacting objects may form prevalent and persistent spatiotemporal patterns, which we refer to as motifs. These motifs can exhibit features that reveal how individual objects interact with one another.…
In eukaryotic cells, mitochondria form networks that range from highly fused interconnected structures to fragmented populations of individual organelles that undergo transient interactions. These structures can be described as temporal…
How do mammalian cells that share the same genome exist in notably distinct phenotypes, exhibiting differences in morphology, gene expression patterns, and epigenetic chromatin statuses? Furthermore how do cells of different phenotypes…
A mechanism of sympatric speciation is presented based on the interaction-induced developmental plasticity of phenotypes. First, phenotypes of individuals with identical genotypes split into a few groups, according to instability in the…
We propose a new self-organizing mechanism behind the emergence of memory in which temporal sequences of stimuli are transformed into spatial activity patterns. In particular, the memory emerges despite the absence of temporal correlations…
Microphase separation of membrane components is thought to play an important role in many physiological processes, from cell signaling to endocytosis and cellular trafficking. Here, we study how variations in the membrane composition can be…
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…
We investigate the outflux of ions through the channels in a cell membrane. The channels undergo an open/close cycle according to a periodic schedule. Our study is based both on theoretical considerations relying on homogenization theory,…
Phenotypic variation is a hallmark of cellular physiology. Metabolic heterogeneity, in particular, underpins single-cell phenomena such as microbial drug tolerance and growth variability. Much research has focussed on transcriptomic and…
T cells use sophisticated shape dynamics (morphodynamics) to migrate towards and neutralise infected and cancerous cells. However, there is limited quantitative understanding of the migration process in 3D extracellular matrices (ECMs) and…
Living cells respond to mechanical changes in the matrix surrounding them by applying contractile forces that are in turn transmitted to distant cells. We calculate the mechanical work that each cell performs in order to deform the matrix,…
Epigenetic Tracking is a mathematical model of biological cells, originally conceived to study embryonic development. Computer simulations proved the capacity of the model to generate complex 3-dimensional cellular structures, and the…
Populations of isogenic embryonic stem cells or clonal bacteria often exhibit extensive phenotypic heterogeneity which arises from stochastic intrinsic dynamics of cells. The internal state of the cell can be transmitted epigenetically in…
Chemotaxis receptors in E. coli form clusters at the cell poles and also laterally along the cell body, and this clustering plays an important role in signal transduction. Recently, experiments using flourrescence imaging have shown that,…
Asymmetric segregation of key proteins at cell division -- be it a beneficial or deleterious protein -- is ubiquitous in unicellular organisms and often considered as an evolved trait to increase fitness in a stressed environment. Here, we…
We identify the dynamical heterogeneities as an essential prerequisite for stretched exponential relaxation in dynamically frustrated systems. This heterogeneity takes the form of ordered domains of finite but diverging lifetime for…