Related papers: Physical limits to biochemical signaling
Interaction of electric fields with biological cells is indispensable for many physiological processes. Thermal electrical noise in the cellular environment has long been considered as the minimum threshold for detection of electrical…
To illustrate the power of the biophysical approach in solving important problems in life science, I present here one of our current research projects as an example. We have developed special biophotonic techniques to study the dynamic…
Biological cells are often found to sense their chemical environment near the single-molecule detection limit. Surprisingly, this precision is higher than simple estimates of the fundamental physical limit, hinting towards active sensing…
This paper studies a chemotaxis system where cells move in response to a chemical signal within a confined habitat. The model includes external source terms that combine local and nonlocal growth with dampening effects. The main focus is on…
Biomolecular logic systems processing biochemical input signals and producing "digital" outputs in the form of YES/NO were developed for analysis of physiological conditions characteristic of liver injury, soft tissue injury and abdominal…
The importance of molecular-scale forces in sculpting biological form and function has been acknowledged for more than a century. Accounting for forces in biology is a problem that lies at the intersection of soft condensed matter physics,…
Cell motility is one of the most fundamental phenomena underlying biological processes that maintain living organisms alive. Here we introduce a simple model to describe the motility of cells which include not only time-correlated internal…
A connection is established between discrete stochastic model describing microscopic motion of fluctuating cells, and macroscopic equations describing dynamics of cellular density. Cells move towards chemical gradient (process called…
Biochemical reactions are fundamentally noisy at a molecular scale. This limits the precision of reaction networks, but also allows fluctuation measurements which may reveal the structure and dynamics of the underlying biochemical network.…
Living cells sense noisy biochemical signals crucial for survival, yet models incorporating intracellular signaling are limited. This study examines how cells sense chemotactic concentrations through phosphorylation readouts in Ca2+…
Cells must continuously sense and respond to time-varying environmental stimuli. These signals are transmitted and processed by biochemical signalling networks. However, the biochemical reactions making up these networks are intrinsically…
Information processing in the mammalian brain relies on a careful regulation of the membrane potential dynamics of its constituent neurons, which propagates across the neuronal tissue via electrical signalling. We recently reported the…
In living systems, collective molecular behavior is driven by thermodynamic forces in the form of chemical gradients. Leveraging recent advances in the field of nonequilibrium physics, I show that increasing the thermodynamic force alone…
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…
Cells rely on the ability to sense and respond to small spatial differences in chemoattractant concentrations for survival. There is growing evidence that this is accomplished by setting the signaling system near the threshold for…
We investigate quantum systems perturbed by noise in the form of repeated interactions between the system and the environment. As the number of interactions (aka time steps) tends to infinity, we show, following the works by Pellegrini,…
We study the effect of chemotactic signaling among mesenchymal cells. We show that the particular physiology of the mesenchymal cells allows one-dimensional collapse in contrast to the case of bacteria, and that the mesenchymal…
These lecture notes were prepared for the 2018 Summer School on `Active Matter and Non-equilibrium Statistical Physics' at l'\'{E}cole de Physique des Houches. They survey metabolic activity across a wide range of living organisms, and…
Bacterial chemotaxis for E.coli is controlled by methylation of chemoreceptors, which in a biochemical pathway regulates the concentration of the CheY-P protein that finally controls the tumbling rate. As a consequence, the tumbling rate…
Examining individual components of cellular systems has been successful in uncovering molecular reactions and interactions. However, the challenge lies in integrating these components into a comprehensive system-scale map. This difficulty…