Related papers: Physical limits to biochemical signaling
Biological information processing as implemented by regulatory and signaling networks in living cells requires sufficient specificity of molecular interaction to distinguish signals from one another, but much of regulation and signaling…
Spatial heterogeneity is a hallmark of living systems, even at the molecular scale in individual cells. A key example is the partitioning of membrane-bound proteins via lipid domain formation or cytoskeleton-induced corralling. Yet the…
Biochemical oscillations are prevalent in living organisms. Systems with a small number of constituents cannot sustain coherent oscillations for an indefinite time because of fluctuations in the period of oscillation. We show that the…
As biochemical systems may frequently suffer from limited energy resources so that internal molecular fluctuation has to be utilized to induce random rhythm, it is still a great theoretical challenge to understand the elementary principles…
The inherent stochasticity of cellular processes leads to significant cell-to-cell variation in protein abundance. Although this noise has already been characterized and modeled, its broader implications and significance remain unclear. In…
The ability to quantify stochastic fluctuations present in biochemical and other systems is becoming increasing important. Analytical descriptions of these fluctuations are attractive, as stochastic simulations are computationally…
Arterial blood pressure is a key vital sign for the health of the human body. As such, accurate and reproducible measurement techniques are necessary for successful diagnosis. Blood pressure measurement is an example of molecular…
We find that discrete noise of inhibiting (signal) molecules can greatly delay the extinction of plasmids in a plasmid replication system: a prototypical biochemical regulatory network. We calculate the probability distribution of the…
Mathematical methods provide useful framework for the analysis and design of complex systems. In newer contexts such as biology, however, there is a need to both adapt existing methods as well as to develop new ones. Using a combination of…
Collective cell migration in response to a chemical cue occurs in many biological processes such as morphogenesis and cancer metastasis. Clusters of migratory cells in these systems are capable of responding to gradients of less than 1%…
Cellular behaviors such as migration, division, and differentiation rely on precise timing, and yet the molecular events that govern these behaviors are highly stochastic. We investigate regulatory strategies that decrease the timing noise…
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…
Life is a nonequilibrium phenomenon: metabolism provides a continuous supply of energy that drives nearly all cellular processes. However, very little is known about how much energy different cellular processes use, i.e. their energetic…
The exchange of small molecular signals within microbial populations is generally referred to as quorum sensing (QS). QS is ubiquitous in nature and enables microorganisms to respond to fluctuations in living environments by working…
Cells employ control strategies to maintain a stable size. Dividing at a target size (the `sizer' strategy) is thought to produce the tightest size distribution. However, this result follows from phenomenological models that ignore the…
It is pointed out that the mystery of how biological systems measure their lengths vanishes away if one premises that they have discovered a way to generate linear waves analogous to compressional sound. These can be used to detect length…
Biological functions in each animal cell depend on coordinated operations of a wide variety of molecular motors. Some of the these motors transport cargo to their respective destinations whereas some others are mobile workshops which…
In the past decades microRNAs (miRNA) have much attracted the attention of researchers at the interface between life and theoretical sciences for their involvement in post-transcriptional regulation and related diseases. Thanks to the…
Intracellular transmission of information via chemical and transcriptional networks is thwarted by a physical limitation: the finite copy number of the constituent chemical species introduces unavoidable intrinsic noise. Here we provide a…
The precision of concentration sensing is improved when cells communicate. Here we derive the physical limits to concentration sensing for cells that communicate over short distances by directly exchanging small molecules (juxtacrine…