相关论文: Can a flux-based mechanism explain positioning of …
Cell division site positioning is precisely regulated to generate correctly sized and shaped daughters. We uncover a novel strategy to position the FtsZ cytokinetic ring at midcell in the social bacterium Myxococcus xanthus. PomX, PomY and…
Precise positioning of the cell division site is essential for the correct segregation of the genetic material into the two daughter cells. In the bacterium Myxococcus xanthus, the proteins PomX and PomY form a cluster on the chromosome…
Myxococcus xanthus cells self-organize into aligned groups, clusters, at various stages of their lifecycle. Formation of these clusters is crucial for the complex dynamic multi-cellular behavior of these bacteria. However, the mechanism…
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,…
Protein aggregation in cell membrane is vital for the majority of biological functions. Recent experimental results suggest that transmembrane domains of proteins such as $\alpha$-helices and $\beta$-sheets have different structural…
It has recently been proposed that proteins embedded in lipidic bio-membranes can spontaneously self-organize into stable small clusters, or membrane nano-domains, due to the competition between short-range attractive and longer-range…
Colonies of the social bacterium Myxococcus xanthus go through a morphological transition from a thin colony of cells to three-dimensional droplet-like fruiting bodies as a strategy to survive starvation. The biological pathways that…
We investigate a mechanism for the polar localization of proteins in bacteria. We focus on the MinCD/DivIVA system regulating division site placement in the rod-shaped bacterium Bacillus subtilis. Our model relies on a combination of…
We present a systematic study of the influence of cell geometry on the orientational distribution of microtubules (MTs) nucleated from a single microtubule organizing center (MTOC). For simplicity we consider an elliptical cell geometry, a…
The soil bacterium Myxococcus xanthus lives in densely packed groups that form dynamic three-dimensional patterns in response to environmental changes, such as droplet-like fruiting bodies during starvation. The development of these…
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…
Prokaryotes do not make use of a nucleus membrane to segregate their genetic material from the cytoplasm, so that their nucleoid is potentially free to explore the whole volume of the cell. Nonetheless, high resolution images of bacteria…
We describe a robust, fast, and memory-efficient procedure that can cluster millions of structures derived from molecular dynamics simulations. The essence of the method is based on a peak-picking algorithm applied to three- and…
Enzymes within biochemical pathways are often colocalized, yet the consequences of specific spatial enzyme arrangements remain poorly understood. We study the impact of enzyme arrangement on reaction efficiency within a reaction-diffusion…
Cell polarization underlies many cellular processes, such as differentiation, migration, and budding. Many living cells, such as budding yeast and fission yeast, use cytoskeletal structures to actively transport proteins to one location on…
Bacterial growth and division generally occur by the process known as binary fission, in which the cells grow polarly until they divide into two daughter cells. Although this process is affected by factors that introduce stochastic…
Circulating tumor cell clusters play an important role in the metastatic cascade. These clusters can acquire a migratory and more invasive phenotype, and coordinate their motion to migrate as a collective. Before such clusters can form by…
Cell adhesion proteins are transmembrane proteins that bind cells to their environment. These proteins typically cluster into disk-shaped or linear structures. Here we show that such clustering patterns spontaneously emerge when the protein…
Non-equilibrium cluster-cluster aggregation of particles diffusing in or at the cell membrane has been hypothesized to lead to domains of finite size in different biological contexts such as lipid rafts, cell adhesion complexes, or…
A novel mechanism for cell differentiation is proposed, based on the dynamic clustering in a globally coupled chaotic system. A simple model with metabolic reaction, active transport of chemicals from media, and cell division is found to…