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The Drosophila melanogaster embryo, an elongated multi-nucleated cell, is a classical model system for eukaryotic development and morphogenesis. Recent work has shown that bulk cytoplasmic flows, driven by cortical contractions along the…
The metabolic network plays a crucial role in regulating bacterial metabolism and growth, but it is subject to inherent molecular stochasticity. Previous studies have utilized flux balance analysis and the maximum entropy method to predict…
Biologically, for any organism life does not start at birth but at fertilization of the embryo. Embryonic development is of great importance because it determines congenital anomalies and influences their severity. Whereas there is detailed…
Understanding the emergence and evolution of multicellularity and cellular differentiation is a core problem in biology. We develop a quantitative model that shows that a multicellular form emerges from genetically identical unicellular…
Rapid advance of experimental techniques provides an unprecedented in-depth view into complex developmental processes. Still, little is known on how the complexity of multicellular organisms evolved by elaborating developmental programs and…
Cell neighbor exchanges are integral to tissue rearrangements in biology, including development and repair. Often these processes occur via topological T1 transitions analogous to those observed in foams, grains and colloids. However, in…
As biomedical sciences discover new layers of complexity in the mechanisms of life and disease, mathematical models trying to catch up with these developments become mathematically intractable. As a result, in the grand scheme of things,…
Complex biological systems are very robust to genetic and environmental changes at all levels of organization. Many biological functions of Escherichia coli metabolism can be sustained against single-gene or even multiple-gene mutations by…
One approach to quantifying biological diversity consists of characterizing the statistical distribution of specific properties of a taxonomic group or habitat. Microorganisms living in fluid environments, and for whom motility is key,…
Eukaryotic cell motility is crucial during development, wound healing, the immune response, and cancer metastasis. Some eukaryotic cells can swim, but cells more commonly adhere to and crawl along the extracellular matrix. We study the…
Coupled biological oscillators can tick with the same period. How this collective period is established is a key question in understanding biological clocks. We explore this question in the segmentation clock, a population of coupled…
Mitosis in the early syncytial Drosophila embryo is highly correlated in space and time, as manifested in mitotic wavefronts that propagate across the embryo. In this paper we investigate the idea that the embryo can be considered a…
Molecular circadian clocks, that are found in all nucleated cells of mammals, are known to dictate rhythms of approximately 24 hours (circa diem) to many physiological processes. This includes metabolism (e.g., temperature, hormonal blood…
One of the most fundamental rules in metabolic ecology is the allometric equation, which is a power-law scaling that describes the connection between body measurements and body size. The biological dynamics of this essentially empirical…
Scaling analysis exploiting timescale separation has been one of the most important techniques in the quantitative analysis of nonlinear dynamical systems in mathematical and theoretical biology. In the case of enzyme catalyzed reactions,…
Flexible modulation of temporal dynamics in neural sequences underlies many cognitive processes. For instance, we can adaptively change the speed of motor sequences and speech. While such flexibility is influenced by various factors such as…
Collective cell migration is a key driver of embryonic development, wound healing, and some types of cancer invasion. Here we provide a physical perspective of the mechanisms underlying collective cell migration. We begin with a catalogue…
The mechanics of crawling cells on a substrate is investigated by using a minimal model that satisfies the force-free condition. A cell is described by two subcellular elements connected by a linear actuator that changes the length of the…
Multicellular collective migration is a ubiquitous strategy of cells to translocate spatially in diverse tissue environments to accomplish a wide variety of biological phenomena, viz. embryonic development, wound healing, and tumor…
Activity-mediated unjamming of a confluent glassy system is crucial for several biological processes, such as embryogenesis and cancer metastasis. During these processes, the cells progressively change their junction properties,…