Related papers: Roadmap for Condensates in Cell Biology
The cells and tissues that make up our body juggle contradictory mechanical demands. It is crucial for their survival to be able to withstand large mechanical loads, but it is equally crucial for them to produce forces and actively change…
The formation of condensates is now considered as a major organization principle of eukaryotic cells. Several studies have recently shown that the properties of these condensates are affected by enzymatic reactions. We propose here a simple…
In this article we highlight chemotaxis (cellular movement) as a rich source of potential engineering applications and computational models, highlighting current research and possible future work. We first give a brief description of the…
This review was written for the Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2008), and is intended as a guide to the growing literature which approaches the phenomena of cell biology from a more theoretical point…
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…
Many organisms form colonies for a transient period of time to withstand environmental pressure. Bacterial biofilms are a prototypical example of such behavior. Despite significant interest across disciplines, physical mechanisms governing…
Much of our mechanistic understanding of the functions of biological macromolecules is based on static structural experiments, which can be modelled either as single structures or conformational ensembles. While these provide us with…
Correlation is not causation. As simple as this widely agreed-upon statement may seem, scientifically defining causality and using it to drive our modern biomedical research is immensely challenging. In this perspective, we attempt to…
Biological cells are able to generate intricate structures and respond to external stimuli, sculpting their membrane from within. Simplified biomimetic systems can aid in understanding the principles which govern these shape changes and…
Cell polarity and movement are fundamental to many biological functions. Experimental and theoretically studies have indicated that interactions of certain proteins lead to the cell polarization which plays a key role in controlling the…
Biological membranes often exhibit heterogeneous protein patterns, which cells control. Strong patterns, like the polarity spot in budding yeast, can be described as surface condensates, formed by physical interactions between constituents.…
Biological nanomachines are nanometer-size macromolecular complexes that catalyze chemical reactions in the presence of substrate molecules. The catalytic functions carried out by such nanomachines in the cytoplasm, and biological membranes…
The work is devoted to the analysis of cell population dynamics where cells make a choice between differentiation and apoptosis. This choice is based on the values of intracellular proteins whose concentrations are described by a system of…
Cell is the structural and functional unit of life. This Resource Letter serves as a guide to the literature on nano-machines which drive not only intracellular movements, but also motility of the cell. These machines are usually proteins…
Condensation of fluctuations is an interesting phenomenon conceptually distinct from condensation on average. One stricking feature is that, contrary to what happens on average, condensation of fluctuations may occurr even in the absence of…
Biomolecular phase separation is typically attributed to the polymer physics of long, disordered chains. However, the underlying chemical grammar, i.e. the specific interactions between protein and RNA building blocks, remains poorly…
The more we learn about the cytoplasm of cells, the more we realise that the cytoplasm is not uniform but instead is highly inhomogeneous. In any inhomogeneous solution, there are concentration gradients, and particles move either up or…
Quantitative modeling has become an essential tool in modern biophysics, driven by advances in both experimental techniques and theoretical frameworks. Powerful high-resolution techniques now provide detailed datasets spanning molecular to…
Many cellular components are present in such low numbers that individual stochastic production and degradation events lead to significant fluctuations in molecular abundances. Although feedback control can, in principle, suppress such…
This paper gives an overview of the use of control systems engineering in synthetic biology, motivated by applications such as cell therapy and cell fate reprogramming for regenerative medicine. A ubiquitous problem in these and other…