Related papers: Impact of receptor-ligand distance on adhesion clu…

Bistability is a major mechanism for cellular decision making and usually results from positive feedback in biochemical control systems. Here we show theoretically that bistability between unbound and bound states of adhesion clusters…

Single receptor-ligand bonds have finite lifetimes, so that biological systems can dynamically react to changes in their environment. In cell adhesion, adhesion bonds usually act cooperatively in adhesion clusters. Outside the cellular…

Receptor-ligand binding is a critical first step in signal transduction and the duration of the interaction can impact signal generation. In mammalian cells, clustering of receptors may be facilitated by heterogeneous zones of lipids, known…

We solve the stochastic equations for a cluster of parallel bonds with shared constant loading, rebinding and the completely dissociated state as an absorbing boundary. In the small force regime, cluster lifetime grows only logarithmically…

Adhesion interactions mediated by multiple bond types are relevant for many biological and soft matter systems, including the adhesion of biological cells and functionalized colloidal particles to various substrates. To elucidate advantages…

This paper considers a broadly biologically relevant question of a chain (such as a protein) binding to a sequence of receptors with matching multiple ligands distributed along the chain. This binding is critical in cell adhesion events,…

Collections of cells exhibit coherent migration during morphogenesis, cancer metastasis, and wound healing. In many cases, bigger clusters split, smaller sub-clusters collide and reassemble, and gaps continually emerge. The connections…

The adhesion of biological membranes is controlled by various types of receptor and ligand molecules. In this letter, we present a statistical-mechanical model for membranes that interact via receptor/ligand bonds of two different lengths.…

We propose a model of mass-conserving heterogeneous nucleation to describe the dynamics of ligand-receptor binding in closed cellular compartments. When the ligand dissociation rate is small, competition among receptors for free ligands…

Intracellular signaling often arises from ligand-induced oligomerization of cell surface receptors. This oligomerization or clustering process is fundamentally a cooperative behavior between near-neighbor receptor molecules; the properties…

The study of the interactions of living adherent cells with mechanically stable (visco)elastic materials enables understanding and exploiting physiological phenomena mediated by cell-extracellular communication. However, insight on the…

Cell membranes interact via anchored receptor and ligand molecules. Central questions on cell adhesion concern the binding affinity of these membrane-anchored molecules, the mechanisms leading to the receptor-ligand domains observed during…

Biomimetic membranes in contact with a planar substrate or a second membrane are studied theoretically. The membranes contain specific adhesion molecules (stickers) which are attracted by the second surface. In the absence of stickers, the…

The adhesion of cell membranes is mediated by the binding of membrane-anchored receptor and ligand proteins. In this article, we review recent results from simulations and theory that lead to novel insights on how the binding equilibrium…

Adhesion between membranes is studied using a phenomenological model, where the inter-membrane distance is coupled to the concentration of sticker molecules on the membranes. The model applies to both for adhesion of two flexible membranes…

We present a simple model of alignment of a large number of rigid bodies (modeled by rotation matrices) subject to internal rotational noise. The numerical simulations exhibit a phenomenon of first order phase transition with respect the…

We investigate clustering of malignant glioma cells. \emph{In vitro} experiments in collagen gels identified a cell line that formed clusters in a region of low cell density, whereas a very similar cell line (which lacks an important…

We analyze the stability of micro-domains of ligand-receptor bonds that mediate the adhesion of biological model membranes. After evaluating the effects of membrane fluctuations on the binding affinity of a single bond, we characterize the…

We devise a method for predicting certain receptor-ligand binding behaviors, based on stochastic dynamical modelling. We consider the dynamics of a receptor binding to a ligand on the cell membrane, where the receptor and ligand perform…

Coagulation and fragmentation (CF) is a fundamental process by which particles attach to each other to form clusters while existing clusters break up into smaller ones. It is a ubiquitous process that plays a key role in many physical and…