Related papers: Physical limits to biochemical signaling
In this paper we show that living cells can multiplex biochemical signals, i.e. transmit multiple signals through the same signaling pathway simultaneously, and yet respond to them very specifically. We demonstrate how two binary input…
Chemotaxis is a fundamental mechanism of cells and organisms, which is responsible for attracting microbes to food, embryonic cells into developing tissues, or immune cells to infection sites. Mathematically chemotaxis is described by the…
Cells are constantly exposed to fluctuating environmental conditions. External signals are sensed, processed and integrated by cellular signal transduction networks, which translate input signals into specific cellular responses by means of…
While noise is generally associated with uncertainties and often has a negative connotation in engineering, living organisms have evolved to adapt to (and even exploit) such uncertainty to ensure the survival of a species or implement…
Genes and proteins regulate cellular functions through complex circuits of biochemical reactions. Fluctuations in the components of these regulatory networks result in noise that invariably corrupts the signal, possibly compromising…
Kinetic-transport equations are, by now, standard models to describe the dynamics of populations of bacteria moving by run-and-tumble. Experimental observations show that bacteria increase their run duration when encountering an increasing…
In quorum sensing (QS), bacteria exchange molecular signals to work together. An analytically-tractable model is presented for characterizing QS signal propagation within a population of bacteria and the number of responsive cooperative…
Living cells maintain size homeostasis by actively compensating for size fluctuations. Here, we present two stochastic maps that unify phenomenological models by integrating fluctuating single-cell growth rates and size-dependent noise…
The large scale behaviour of a population of cells that grow and interact through the concentration field of the chemicals they secrete is studied using dynamical renormalization group methods. The combination of the effective long-range…
Mechanical stresses stemming from environmental factors are a key determinant of cellular behavior and physiology. Yet, the role of self-induced biomechanical stresses in growing bacterial colonies has remained largely unexplored. Here, we…
One of the important challenges facing high resolution molecular dynamics calculations is to reproduce biological functions that occur in the macroscopic world and involve macroscopic variables. Some of these functions can be well described…
A dynamic model for failures in biological organisms is proposed and studied both analytically and numerically. Each cell in the organism becomes dead under sufficiently strong stress, and is then allowed to be healed with some probability.…
Mechanics and biochemical signaling are both often deregulated in cancer, leading to cancer cell phenotypes that exhibit increased invasiveness, proliferation, and survival. The dynamics and interactions of cytoskeletal components control…
Understanding cell function requires an accurate description of how noise is transmitted through biochemical networks. We present an analytical result for the power spectrum of the output signal of a biochemical network that takes into…
Feedback in sensory biochemical networks can give rise to bifurcations in cells' behavioral response. These bifurcations share many properties with thermodynamic critical points. Evidence suggests that biological systems may operate near…
Motile cells often explore natural environments characterized by a high degree of structural complexity. Moreover cell motility is also intrinsically noisy due to spontaneous random reorientation and speed fluctuations. This interplay of…
There are many processes in biology in which mechanical forces are generated. Force-bearing networks can transduce locally developed mechanical signals very extensively over different parts of the cell or tissues. In this article we conduct…
The expressive capacity of physical systems employed for learning is limited by the unavoidable presence of noise in their extracted outputs. Though present in physical systems across both the classical and quantum regimes, the precise…
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…
Living cells actively regulate their volume in response to changes in the extra-cellular environment, such as osmolarity and chemo-attractant concentration. While the basic physical mechanisms of volume regulation are understood from the…