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A detailed understanding of the interface between living cells and substrate materials is of rising importance in many fields of medicine, biology and biotechnology. Cells at interfaces often form epithelia. The physical barrier that they…
Understanding the regulation and structure of ribosomes is essential to understanding protein synthesis and its deregulation in disease. While ribosomes are believed to have a fixed stoichiometry among their core ribosomal proteins (RPs),…
Cell extrusion is an essential mechanism for controlling cell density in epithelial tissues. Another essential element of epithelia is curvature, which is required to achieve complex shapes, like in the lung or intestine. Here we introduce…
Translation is one of the main steps in the synthesis of proteins. It consists of ribosomes that translate sequences of nucleotides encoded on mRNA into polypeptide sequences of amino acids. Ribosomes bound to mRNA move unidirectionally,…
As an injury heals, an embryo develops, or a carcinoma spreads, epithelial cells systematically change their shape. In each of these processes cell shape is studied extensively, whereas variation of shape from cell-to-cell is dismissed most…
Receptor-mediated endocytosis requires that the energy of adhesion overcomes the deformation energy of the plasma membrane. The resulting driving force is balanced by dissipative forces, leading to deterministic dynamical equations. While…
We introduce a particle-based model of self-replicating cells on a deformable substrate composed of the dermis and the basement membrane and investigate the relationship between dermal deformations and stem cell pattering on it. We show…
Diffusive motion of regulatory enzymes on biopolymers with eventual capture at a reaction site is a common feature in cell biology. Using a lattice gas model we study the impact of diffusion and capture for a microtubule polymerase and a…
Biological cells use droplets to separate components and spatially control their interior. Experiments demonstrate that the complex, crowded cellular environment affects the droplet arrangement and their sizes. To understand this behavior,…
The number of ribosomes in a cell is considered as limiting, and gene expression is thus largely determined by their cellular concentration. In this work we develop a toy model to study the trade-off between the ribosomal supply and the…
A stochastic model is used to assess the effect of external parameters on the development of submerged biofilms on smooth and rough surfaces. The model includes basic cellular mechanisms, such as division and spreading, together with an…
During the life of animals, epithelial tissues undergo extensive deformations--first to form organs during embryogensis and later to preserve integrity and function in adulthood. To what extent these deformations resemble that of non-living…
Cellular uptake through the lipid membranes plays an important role in adsorbing nutrients and fighting infection and can be used for drug delivery and nanomedicine developments. Endocytosis is one of the known pathways of the cellular…
Since its foundations, more than one hundred years ago, the field of structural biology has strived to understand and analyze the properties of molecules and their interactions by studying the structure that they take in 3D space. However,…
Super-Resolution Microscopy (SRM) is emerging as a powerful and innovative tool for imaging, characterizing, and understanding the structure of Extracellular Vesicles (EVs). By addressing the need for single-particle analysis with the high…
In eukaryotic cells, KDEL receptors (KDELRs) facilitate the retrieval of endoplasmic reticulum (ER) luminal proteins from the Golgi compartment back to the ER. Apart from the well-documented retention function, recent findings reveal that…
Newly-translated glycoproteins in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) often undergo cycles of chaperone binding and release in order to assist in folding. Quality control is required to distinguish between proteins that have completed native…
The maintenance of tissue and organ structures during dynamic homeostasis is often not well understood. In order for a system to be stable, cell renewal, cell migration and cell death must be finely balanced. Moreover, a tissue's shape must…
Cellular decision making allows cells to assume functionally different phenotypes in response to microenvironmental cues, without genetic change. It is an open question, how individual cell decisions influence the dynamics at the tissue…
The Extra-Cellular-Matrix (ECM) is a complex interconnected 3D network that provides structural support for the cells and tissues and defines organ architecture key for their healthy functioning. However, the intimate mechanisms by which…