Related papers: A hyperbolic cell cycle law for early embryonic de…
Control of cell proliferation is a fundamental aspect of tissue physiology central to morphogenesis, wound healing and cancer. Although many of the molecular genetic factors are now known, the system level regulation of growth is still…
Metabolism and evolution are closely connected: if a mutation incurs extra energetic costs for an organism, there is a baseline selective disadvantage that may or may not be compensated for by other adaptive effects. A long-standing, but to…
Through extensive studies of dynamical system modeling cellular growth and reproduction, we find evidence that complexity arises in multicellular organisms naturally through evolution. Without any elaborate control mechanism, these systems…
The metazoan body plan is established during early embryogenesis via collective cell rearrangements and evolutionarily conserved gene networks, as part of a process commonly referred to as gastrulation. While substantial progress has been…
Measurements on embryonic epithelial tissues in a diverse range of organisms have shown that the statistics of cell neighbor numbers are universal in tissues where cell proliferation is the primary cell activity. Highly simplified…
Microbial growth and division are fundamental processes relevant to many areas of life science. Of particular interest are homeostasis mechanisms, which buffer growth and division from accumulating fluctuations over multiple cycles. These…
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…
A model to describe the arising of new structures in an initial homogeneous biological system is proposed. The essay is motivated by the intention to work on a non-equilibrium situation grouping together several mechanisms and processes as:…
Microbes require several complex organic molecules for growth. A species may obtain a required factor by taking up molecules released by other species or by synthesizing the molecule. The patterns of uptake and synthesis set a flow of…
Cell growth in size is a complex process coordinated by intrinsic and environmental signals. In a recent work [Tzur et al., Science, 2009, 325:167-171], size distributions in an exponentially growing population of mammalian cells were used…
Cellular development follows a stochastic yet rule-governed trajectory, though the underlying principles remain elusive. Here, we propose that cellular development follows paths of least action, aligning with foundational physical laws that…
Controlling growth via cell division is crucial in the development of higher organisms, and yet the mechanisms through which this is achieved, e.g., in epithelial tissue, is not yet fully understood. We show that by coupling the cell cycle…
How are granular details of stochastic growth and division of individual cells reflected in smooth deterministic growth of population numbers? We provide an integrated, multiscale perspective of microbial growth dynamics by formulating a…
Based on symmetry consideration of migration and shape deformations, we formulate phenomenologically the dynamics of cell crawling in two dimensions. Forces are introduced to change the cell shape. The shape deformations induce migration of…
Cyanobacteria are an integral part of the Earth's biogeochemical cycles and a promising resource for the synthesis of renewable bioproducts from atmospheric CO2 . Growth and metabolism of cyanobacteria are inherently tied to the diurnal…
A big challenge in current biology is to understand the exact self-organization mechanism underlying complex multi-physics coupling developmental processes. With multiscale computations of from subcellular gene expressions to cell…
Recent studies at individual cell resolution have revealed phenotypic heterogeneity in nominally clonal tumor cell populations. The heterogeneity affects cell growth behaviors, which can result in departure from the idealized uniform…
During development, embryos perform a mesmerizing choreography, which is crucial for the correct shaping, positioning and function of all organs. The cellular properties powering animal morphogenesis have been the focus of much attention.…
The physics of how molecules, organelles, and foreign objects move within living cells has been extensively studied in organisms ranging from bacteria to human cells. In mammalian cells, in particular, cellular vesicles move across the cell…
Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how…