Related papers: Aging and Immortality in a Cell Proliferation Mode…

Do biological cells sense time by the number of their divisions, a process that ends at senescence? We consider the question "can the cell's perception of time be expressed through the length of the shortest telomere?" The answer is that…

Telomeres are repetitive sequences of nucleotides at the end of chromosomes, whose evolution over time is intrinsically related to biological ageing. In most cells, with each cell division, telomeres shorten due to the so-called end…

As cell proliferation is limited due to the loss of telomere repeats in DNA of normal somatic cells during division, telomere attrition can possibly play an important role in determining the maximum life span of organisms as well as…

Mammalian cells are restricted from proliferating indefinitely. Telomeres at the end of each chromosome are shortened at cell division and, when they reach a critical length, the cell will enter permanent cell cycle arrest - a state known…

Telomeres are repetitive sequences situated at both ends of the chromosomes of eukaryotic cells. At each cell division, they are eroded until they reach a critical length that triggers a state in which the cell stops to divide: the…

The lengths of the telomere regions of chromosomes in a population of cells are modelled using a chemical master equation formalism, from which the evolution of the average number of cells of each telomere length is extracted. In…

Cell populations invade through a combination of proliferation and motility. Proliferation depends on the internal timing of cell division: how long cells take to complete the cell cycle. This timing varies substantially within (and across)…

We build and study an individual based model of the telomere length's evolution in a population across multiple generations. This model is a continuous time typed branching process, where the type of an individual includes its gamete mean…

The cell cycle duration is a variable cellular phenotype that underlies long-term population growth and age structures. By analyzing the stationary solutions of a branching process with heritable cell division times, we demonstrate…

A model of telomere dynamics is proposed and examined. Our model, which extends a previously introduced two-compartment model that incorporates stem cells as progenitors of new cells, imposes the Hayflick Limit, the maximum number of cell…

Cells of the human body have nearly identical genome but exhibit very different phenotypes that allow them to carry out specific functions and react to changes in their surrounding environment. This division of labour is achieved by…

Stem cells are characterized by their ability to self-renew, as well as to differentiate and give rise to new populations of cells. Stem cell divisions are crucial for generative processes that occur during early development, and later in…

We study time continuous branching processes with exponentially distributed lifetimes, with two types of cells that proliferate according to binary fission. A range of possible system dynamics are considered, each of which is characterized…

Replicative senescence, induced by telomere shortening, exhibits considerable asynchrony and heterogeneity, the origins of which remain unclear. Here, we formally study how telomere shortening mechanisms impact on senescence kinetics and…

We investigate a partial differential equation model of a cancer cell population, which is structured with respect to age and telomere length of cells. We assume a continuous telomere length structure, which is applicable to the clonal…

The spread of a particular trait in a cell population often is modelled by an appropriate system of ordinary differential equations describing how the sizes of subpopulations of the cells with the same genome change in time. On the other…

Development combines three basic processes asymmetric --- cell division, signaling and gene regulation --- in a multitude of ways to create an overwhelming diversity of multicellular life-forms. Here, we attempt to chart this diversity…

We present a novel mathematical model of heterogeneous cell proliferation where the total population consists of a subpopulation of slow-proliferating cells and a subpopulation of fast-proliferating cells. The model incorporates two…

The spatiotemporal coordination and regulation of cell proliferation is fundamental in many aspects of development and tissue maintenance. Cells have the ability to adapt their division rates in response to mechanical constraints, yet we do…

Controlling growth via cell division is crucial in the development of higher organisms, and yet the mechanisms through which this is achieved, e.g., in epithelial tissue, is not yet fully understood. We show that by coupling the cell cycle…