Related papers: Spatio-temporal patterns of active epigenetic turn…
The migration of cells is relevant for processes such as morphogenesis, wound healing, and invasion of cancer cells. In order to move, single cells deform cyclically. However, it is not understood how these shape oscillations influence…
Topological entanglements severely interfere with important biological processes. For this reason, genomes must be kept unknotted and unlinked during most of a cell cycle. Type II Topoisomerase (TopoII) enzymes play an important role in…
In this letter, we characterize experimentally the diffusiophoretic motion of colloids and lambda- DNA toward higher concentration of solutes, using microfluidic technology to build spatially- and temporally-controlled concentration…
Epigenetic inheritance during cell division is essential for preserving cell identity by stabilizing the overall chromatin organisation. Heterochromatin,the condensed and transcriptionally silent fraction of chromatin,is marked by specific…
Recent high resolution experiments have provided a quantitative description of the statistical properties of interphase chromatin at large scales. These findings have stimulated a search for generic physical interactions that give rise to…
Active force generation by actin-myosin cortex coupled to the cell membrane allows the cell to deform, respond to the environment, and mediate cell motility and division. Several membrane-bound activator proteins move along it and couple to…
Investigating the dynamics of chromatin and the factors that are affecting it, has provided valuable insights into the organization and functionality of the genome in the cell nucleus. We control the expression of Lamin-A, an important…
Oscillatory chemical reactions often serve as a timing clock of cellular processes in living cells. The temporal dynamics of protein concentration levels is thus of great interest in biology. Here we propose a theoretical framework to…
Multi-component membranes such as ternary mixtures of lipids and cholesterol can exhibit coexistence regions between two liquid phases. When such membranes adhere to a corrugated substrate, the phase separation process strongly depends on…
Cell crawling on flat substrates is based on intracellular flows of the actin cytoskeleton that are driven by both actin polymerization at the front and myosin contractility at the back. The new experimental tool of optogenetics makes it…
Self-organization phenomena in ensembles of self-propelled particles open pathways to the synthesis of new dynamic states not accessible by traditional equilibrium processes. The challenge is to develop a set of principles that facilitate…
Nucleocytoplasmic transport is essential for cellular function, presenting a canonical example of rapid molecular sorting inside cells. It consists of a coordinated interplay between import/export of molecules in/out the cell nucleus. Here,…
We propose that the degree of sweeling of the 30nm chromatin fiber (a "measure" of its transcriptional activity) is mainly determined by the short-ranged electrostatical interaction between different sections of the "folded" DNA chain.…
A general model for the early recognition and colocalization of homologous DNA sequences is proposed. We show, on a thermodynamic ground, how the distance between two homologous DNA sequences is spontaneously regulated by the concentration…
Biological systems exhibit marked molecular asymmetry, with proteins based predominantly on L-amino acids and nucleic acids and carbohydrates largely composed of D-sugars. Explanations for homochirality include asymmetric photochemistry,…
The three-dimensional organization of chromatin is thought to play an important role in controlling gene expression. Specificity in expression is achieved through the interaction of transcription factors and other nuclear proteins with…
We study the coarsening of strongly microphase separated membrane domains in the presence of recycling of material. We study the dynamics of the domain size distribution under both scale-free and size-dependent recycling. Closed form…
Intact-organism imaging of Drosophila larvae reveals and quantifies chromatin-aqueous phase separation. The chromatin can be organized near the lamina layer of the nuclear envelope, conventionally fill the nucleus, be organized centrally,…
Biological mixtures such as the cytosol may consist of thousands of distinct components. There is now a substantial body of evidence showing that, under physiological conditions, intracellular mixtures can phase separate into spatially…
The spontaneous generation of electrical activity underpins a number of essential physiological processes, and is observed even in tissues where specialized pacemaker cells have not been identified. The emergence of periodic oscillations in…