Related papers: Mechanical activity enables patterning and discrim…
Enzymatic molecules that actively support many cellular processes, including transport, cell division and cell motility, are known as motor proteins or molecular motors. Experimental studies indicate that they interact with each other and…
The cytoskeleton is an active composite of filamentous proteins that dictates diverse mechanical properties and processes in eukaryotic cells by generating forces and autonomously restructuring itself. Enzymatic motors that act on the…
Learning and memory relies on synapses changing their strengths in response to neural activity. However there is a substantial gap between the timescales of neural electrical dynamics (1-100 ms) and organism behaviour during learning…
T-cells are a crucial subset of white blood cells that play a central role in the immune system. When T-cells bind antigens, it leads to cell activation and the induction of an immune response. If T-cells are activated by antigens in vivo…
Active gels perform key mechanical roles inside the cell, such as cell division, motion and force sensing. The unique mechanical properties required to perform such functions arise from the interactions between molecular motors and…
The emerging field of immunometabolism has underscored the central role of metabolic pathways in orchestrating immune cell function. Far from being passive background processes, metabolic activities actively regulate key immune responses.…
Biological systems encode function not primarily in steady states, but in the structure of transient responses elicited by time-varying stimuli. Overshoots, biphasic dynamics, adaptation kinetics, fold-change detection, entrainment, and…
The actin cytoskeleton in living cells generates forces in conjunction with myosin motor proteins to directly and indirectly drive essential cellular processes. The semiflexible filaments of the cytoskeleton can respond nonlinearly to the…
Mechanical cues from the extracellular microenvironment play a central role in regulating the structure, function and fate of living cells. Nevertheless, the precise nature of the mechanisms and processes underlying this crucial cellular…
Advances in synthetic biology allow us to engineer bacterial collectives with pre-specified characteristics. However, the behavior of these collectives is difficult to understand, as cellular growth and division as well as extra-cellular…
Many patterning events in multi-cellular organisms rely on cell-to-cell contact signaling, such as the Notch pathway in metazoans. A particularly interesting phenomenon in this form of communication is lateral inhibition where a cell that…
Machine learning algorithms can be fooled by small well-designed adversarial perturbations. This is reminiscent of cellular decision-making where ligands (called antagonists) prevent correct signalling, like in early immune recognition. We…
Living creatures exhibit a remarkable diversity of locomotion mechanisms, evolving structures specialised for interacting with their environment. In the vast majority of cases, locomotor behaviours such as flying, crawling, and running, are…
Anchorage-dependent cells collect information on the mechanical properties of the environment through their contractile machineries and use this information to position and orient themselves. Since the probing process is anisotropic,…
Synchronization of activity among myocytes constituting vital organs, e.g., the heart, is crucial for physiological functions. Self-organized coordination in such heterogeneous ensemble of excitable and oscillatory cells is therefore of…
A number of biological processes, such as embryo development, cancer metastasis or wound healing, rely on cells moving in concert. The mechanisms leading to the emergence of coordinated motion remain however largely unexplored. Although…
Many types of mammalian cells exert active contractile forces and mechanically deform their elastic substrate, to accomplish biological functions such as cell migration. These substrate deformations provide a mechanism by which cells can…
Active stresses in biological cells and tissues drive many developmental processes. However, increasing experimental evidence suggests that additional mechanical interactions with surrounding material can play a crucial role in guiding…
The mechanics of cells is strongly affected by molecular motors that generate forces in the cellular cytoskeleton. We develop a model for cytoskeletal networks driven out of equilibrium by molecular motors exerting transient contractile…
Many cellular processes require a polarization axis which generally initially emerges as an inhomogeneous distribution of molecular markers in the cell. We present a simple analytical model of a general mechanism of cell polarization taking…