亚细胞过程
Molecular motors power directed transport of cargoes within cells. Even if a single motor is sufficient to transport a cargo, motors often cooperate in small teams. We discuss the cooperative cargo transport by several motors theoretically…
Using computational modelling, we investigate mechanisms of signal transduction focusing on the spindle assembly checkpoint where a single unattached kinetochore is able to signal to prevent cell cycle progression. This inhibitory signal…
Adhesion-dependent cells actively sense the mechanical properties of their environment through mechanotransductory processes at focal adhesions, which are integrin-based contacts connecting the extracellular matrix to the cytoskeleton. Here…
Chemical reaction systems operating in nonequilibrium open-system states arise in a great number of contexts, including the study of living organisms, in which chemical reactions, in general, are far from equilibrium. Here we introduce a…
Microtubules (MTs) are important cytoskeletal structures, engaged in a number of specific cellular activities, including vesicular traffic, cell cyto-architecture and motility, cell division, and information processing within neuronal…
We propose a simple model for mass transport within a fungal hypha and its subsequent growth. Inspired by the role of microtubule-transported vesicles, we embody the internal dynamics of mass inside a hypha with mutually excluding particles…
A novel theoretical model of dynamic instability of a system of linear (1D) microtubules (MTs) in a bounded domain is introduced for studying the role of a cell edge in vivo and analyzing the effect of competition for a limited amount of…
We analyze the role of the force-dependent kinetics of motor proteins in the stability of antiparallel arrays of polar filaments, such as those in the mitotic spindle. We determine the possible stable structures and show that there exists…
DNA looping plays a fundamental role in a wide variety of biological processes, providing the backbone for long range interactions on DNA. Here we develop the first model for DNA looping by an arbitrarily large number of proteins and solve…
There is a correspondence between the circulation of blood in all higher animals and the circulation of sap in all higher plants - up to heights h of 140 m - through the xylem and phloem vessels. Plants suck in water from the soil,…
The influence of intrinsic channel noise on the spontaneous spiking activity of poisoned excitable membrane patches is studied by use of a stochastic generalization of the Hodgkin-Huxley model. Internal noise stemming from the stochastic…
The transport of cargo particles which are pulled by several molecular motors in a cooperative manner is studied theoretically. The transport properties depend primarily on the maximal number, $N$, of motor molecules that may pull…
Phage lambda is one of the most studied biological models in modern molecular biology. Over the past 50 years quantitative experimental knowledge on this biological model has been accumulated at all levels: physics, chemistry, genomics,…
The Min system in Escherichia coli directs division to the centre of the cell through pole-to-pole oscillations of the MinCDE proteins. We present a one dimensional stochastic model of these oscillations which incorporates membrane…
The conditions of the chromosomes inside the nucleus in the Rabl configuration have been modelled as self-avoiding polymer chains under restraining conditions. To ensure that the chromosomes remain stretched out and lined up, we fixed their…
It has long been hypothesized that futile cycles in cellular metabolism are involved in the regulation of biochemical pathways. Following the work of Newsholme and Crabtree, we develop a quantitative theory for this idea based on…
The Bacillus subtilis Spo0J/Soj proteins, implicated in chromosome segregation and transcriptional regulation, show striking dynamics: Soj undergoes irregular relocations from pole to pole or nucleoid to nucleoid. Here we report on a…
We propose a mechanism for mechanical regulation at the membrane of living cells, based on the exchange of membrane area between the cell membrane and a membrane reservoir. The reservoir is composed of invaginated membrane microdomains…
We model the dynamical states of the C-termini of tubulin dimers that comprise neuronal microtubules. We use molecular dynamics and other computational tools to explore the time-dependent behavior of conformational states of a C-terminus of…
We introduce a three-dimensional stochastic reaction-diffusion model to describe MinD/MinE dynamical structures in Escherichia coli. This model spontaneously generates pole-to-pole oscillations of the membrane-associated MinD proteins, MinE…