Related papers: Pattern formation inside bacteria: fluctuations du…
Self-organization of proteins in space and time is of crucial importance for the functioning of cellular processes. Often, this organization takes place in the presence of strong random fluctuations due to the small number of molecules…
Protein pattern formation is essential for the spatial organization of many intracellular processes like cell division, flagellum positioning, and chemotaxis. A prominent example of intracellular patterns are the oscillatory pole-to-pole…
Positioning of the midcell division plane within the bacterium E. coli is controlled by the min system of proteins: MinC, MinD and MinE. These proteins coherently oscillate from end to end of the bacterium. We present a reaction--diffusion…
Intracellular protein patterns govern essential cellular functions by dynamically redistributing proteins between membrane-bound and cytosolic states, conserving their total numbers. This review presents a theoretical framework for…
A weak correlation between the diffusion-exponent fluctuations and the temperature fluctuations is discussed based on recent experimental observations for protein diffusion inside bacteria. Its existence is shown to be essential for…
The spectrum and scale of fluctuations in protein structures affect the range of cell phenomena, including stability of protein structures or their fragments, allosteric transitions and energy transfer. The study presents a…
The spatiotemporal oscillation patterns of the proteins MinD and MinE are used by the bacterium E. coli to sense its own geometry. Strikingly, both computer simulations and experiments have recently shown that for the same geometry of the…
Protein variability in single cells has been studied extensively in populations, but little is known about temporal protein fluctuations in a single cell over extended times. We present here traces of protein copy number measured in…
The copy number of any protein fluctuates among cells in a population; characterizing and understanding these fluctuations is a fundamental problem in biophysics. We show here that protein distributions measured under a broad range of…
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…
We consider two types of fluctuations in the mass-action equilibrium in protein binding networks. The first type is driven by relatively slow changes in total concentrations (copy numbers) of interacting proteins. The second type, to which…
Information transmission in cells occurs quite accurately even when concentration changes are "read" by individual target molecules. In this Letter we study molecule number fluctuations when molecules diffuse and react. We show that, for…
Spatial organization of proteins in cells is important for many biological functions. In general, the nonlinear, spatially coupled models for protein-pattern formation are only accessible to numerical simulations, which has limited insight…
Protein evolution involves mutations occurring across a wide range of time scales. In analogy with disordered systems in statistical physics, this dynamical heterogeneity suggests strong correlations between mutations happening at distinct…
In E. coli the determination of the middle of the cell and the proper placement of the septum is essential to the division of the cell. This step depends on the proteins MinC, MinD, and MinE. Exposure to a constant external field e.g., an…
Structure fluctuations and conformational changes accompany all biological processes involving macromolecules. The paper presents a classification of protein residues based on the normalized equilibrium fluctuations of the residue centers…
Conformational fluctuations are believed to play an important role in the process by which transcription factor proteins locate and bind their target site on the genome of a bacterium. Using a simple model, we show that the binding time can…
Stochasticity is both exploited and controlled by cells. Although the intrinsic stochasticity inherent in biochemistry is relatively well understood, cellular variation, or 'noise', is predominantly generated by interactions of the system…
A model of interacting random walkers is presented and shown to give rise to patterns consisting in periodic arrangements of fluctuating particle clusters. The model represents biological individuals that die or reproduce at rates depending…
Phenotypes of individuals in a population of organisms are not fixed. Phenotypic fluctuations, which describe temporal variation of the phenotype of an individual or individual-to-individual variation across a population, are present in…