Related papers: Pattern formation within Escherichia coli: diffusi…
We use the oscillating Min proteins of Escherichia coli as a prototype system to illustrate the current state and potential of modeling protein dynamics in space and time. We demonstrate how a theoretical approach has led to striking new…
Experimental studies of cell motility in culture have shown that under adequate conditions these living organisms possess the ability to organize themselves into complex structures. Such structures may exhibit a synergy that greatly…
Isogenic Escherichia coli growing exponentially in a constant environment display large variation in growth-rates, division-sizes and generation-times. It is unclear how these seemingly random cell cycles can be reconciled with the precise…
Chemotaxis receptors in E. coli form clusters at the cell poles and also laterally along the cell body, and this clustering plays an important role in signal transduction. Recently, experiments using flourrescence imaging have shown that,…
The distributions of many proteins in rod-shaped bacteria are far from homogenous. Often they accumulate at the cell poles or in the cell center. At the same time, the copy number of proteins in a single cell is relatively small making the…
The motion of a eukaryotic cell presents a variety of interesting and challenging problems from both a modeling and a computational perspective. The processes span many spatial scales (from molecular to tissue) as well as disparate time…
We examine fluctuation effects due to the low copy number of proteins involved in pattern-forming dynamics within a bacterium. We focus on a stochastic model of the oscillating MinCDE protein system regulating accurate cell division in E.…
How the cells break symmetry and organize their edge activity to move directionally is a fun- damental question in cell biology. Physical models of cell motility commonly rely on gradients of regulatory factors and/or feedback from the…
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…
We review the key role played by mathematical modelling in elucidating two centre-finding patterning systems in E. coli: midcell division positioning by the MinCDE system and DNA partitioning by the ParABS system. We focus particularly on…
Spatial constraints such as rigid barriers affect the dynamics of cell populations, potentially altering the course of natural evolution. In this paper, we investigate the population genetics of Escherichia coli proliferating in…
We investigate the oscillatory dynamics and bifurcation structure of a reaction-diffusion system with bistable nonlinearity and mass conservation, which was proposed by [Otsuji et al, PLoS Comp. Biol. 3 (2007), e108]. The system is a useful…
Ordered polarity alignment of a cell population plays a vital role in biology, such as in hair follicle alignment and asymmetric cell division. Here, we propose a theoretical framework for the understanding of generic dynamical properties…
In multicellular organisms, epithelial cells form layers separating compartments responsible for different physiological functions. At the early stage of epithelial layer formation, each cell of an aggregate defines an inner and an outer…
Escherichia coli has long been a trusty companion, maintaining health in our guts and advancing biological knowledge in the laboratory. In light of recent findings, we discuss multicellular self-organization in E. coli and develop general…
Lateral diffusion of molecules on surfaces plays a very important role in various biological processes, including lipid transport across the cell membrane, synaptic transmission and other phenomena such as exo- and endocytosis, signal…
The cell cortex, a thin film of active material assembled below the cell membrane, plays a key role in cellular symmetry breaking processes such as cell polarity establishment and cell division. Here, we present a minimal model of the…
A new experimental colonial pattern and pattern transition observed in E. coli MG1655 swarming cells grown on semi-solid agar are described. We present a reaction-diffusion model that, taking into account the slime generated by these cells…
Many essential cellular processes, including cell division and the establishment of cell polarity during embryogenesis, are regulated by pattern-forming proteins. These proteins often need to bind to a substrate, such as the cell membrane,…
Reaction-diffusion models with nonlocal constraints naturally arise as limiting cases of coupled bulk-surface models of intracellular signalling. In this paper, a minimal, mass-conserving model of cell-polarization on a curved membrane is…