Related papers: Morphogen Transport in Epithelia
Adhesion-independent migration is a prominent mode of cell motility in confined environments, yet the physical principles that guide such movement remain incompletely understood. We present a phase-field model for simulating the motility of…
Embryonic development involves pattern formation characterized by the emergence of spatially localized domains characterized by distinct cell fates resulting from differential gene expression. The boundaries demarcating these domains are…
Cytoplasmic streaming, the coherent flow of cytoplasm, plays a critical role in transport and mixing over large scales in eukaryotic cells. In many large cells, this process is driven by active forces at the cell boundary, such as cortical…
The properties of a front between two different phases in the presence of a smoothly inhomogeneous external field that takes its critical value at the crossing point is analyzed. Two generic scenarios are studied. In the first, the system…
The transport of particles in cells is influenced by the properties of intracellular networks they traverse while searching for localized target regions or reaction partners. Moreover, given the rapid turnover in many intracellular…
Intracellular transport of organelles is fundamental to cell function and health. The mounting evidence suggests that this transport is in fact anomalous. However, the reasons for the anomaly is still under debate. We examined experimental…
Tissue deformations during morphogenesis can be active, driven by internal processes, or passive, resulting from stresses applied at their boundaries. Here, we introduce the Drosophila hindgut primordium as a model for studying…
Cell migration is closely linked to cell shape, yet cell size is often assumed to remain constant. This assumption is challenged by recent experiments showing that cells undergo volume loss during spreading and swelling upon activation,…
Many cellular networks rely on the regulated transport of their components to transduce extracellular information into precise intracellular signals. The dynamics of these networks is typically described in terms of compartmentalized…
We discuss a theoretical model for bidirectional cargo transport in biological cells, which is driven by teams of molecular motors and subject to thermal fluctuations. The model describes explicitly the directed motion of the molecular…
Internet, social media, neuronal or blood vessel are organized in complex networks. These networks are characterized by several quantities such as the underlying graph connectivity (topology), how they grow in time, scaling laws or by the…
Within developing embryos, tissues flow and reorganize dramatically on timescales as short as minutes. This includes epithelial tissues, which often narrow and elongate in convergent extension movements due to anisotropies in external…
We measure different contributions to entropy production in a living functional epithelial tissue. We do this by extracting the functional dynamics of development while at the same time quantifying fluctuations. Using the translucent…
We propose a multiscale model of the invasion of the extracellular matrix by two types of cancer cells, the differentiated cancer cells and the cancer stem cells. We assume that the epithelial mesenchymal-like transition between them is…
The process of morphogenesis, which can be defined as an evolution of the form of an organism, is one of the most intriguing mysteries in the life sciences. It is clear, that gene expression patterns cannot explain the development of the…
We investigate morphologies of proliferating cellular tissue using a newly developed numerical simulation model for mechanical cell division. The model reproduces structures of simple multi-cellular organisms via simple rules for selective…
A key process in the life of any multicellular organism is its development from a single egg into a full grown adult. The first step in this process often consists of forming a tissue layer out of randomly placed cells on the surface of the…
Motile biological cells in tissue often display the phenomenon of durotaxis, i.e. they tend to move towards stiffer parts of substrate tissue. The mechanism for this behavior is not completely understood. We consider simplified models for…
Left-right axis specification establishes embryonic laterality through asymmetric signaling cascades originating at the cellular scale. We previously reported the presence of a directionality bias in confined pairs of endothelial (and…
We study a minimal lattice model which describes bidirectional transport of "particles" driven along a one dimensional track, as is observed in microtubule based, motor protein driven bidirectional transport of cargo vesicles, lipid bodies…