No Arabic abstract
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, during cell growth, lateral clusters form at positions approximately periodically spaced along the cell body. In this paper, we demonstrate within a lattice model that such spatial organization could arise spontaneously from a stochastic nucleation mechanism. The same mechanism may explain the recent observation of periodic aggregates of misfolded proteins in E. coli.
We introduce a simple physical picture to explain the process of molecular sorting, whereby specific proteins are concentrated and distilled into submicrometric lipid vesicles in eukaryotic cells. To this purpose, we formulate a model based on the coupling of spontaneous molecular aggregation with vesicle nucleation. Its implications are studied by means of a phenomenological theory describing the diffusion of molecules towards multiple sorting centers that grow due to molecule absorption and are extracted when they reach a sufficiently large size. The predictions of the theory are compared with numerical simulations of a lattice-gas realization of the model and with experimental observations. The efficiency of the distillation process is found to be optimal for intermediate aggregation rates, where the density of sorted molecules is minimal and the process obeys simple scaling laws. Quantitative measures of endocytic sorting performed in primary endothelial cells are compatible with the hypothesis that these optimal conditions are realized in living cells.
We revisit motility-induced phase separation in two models of active particles interacting by pairwise repulsion. We show that the resulting dense phase contains gas bubbles distributed algebraically up to a typically large cutoff scale. At large enough system size and/or global density, all the gas may be contained inside the bubbles, at which point the system is microphase-separated with a finite cut-off bubble scale. We observe that the ordering is anomalous, with different dynamics for the coarsening of the dense phase and of the gas bubbles. This phenomenology is reproduced by a reduced bubble model that implements the basic idea of reverse Ostwald ripening put forward in Tjhung et al. [Phys. Rev. X 8, 031080 (2018)].
We consider self-propelled particles undergoing run-and-tumble dynamics (as exhibited by E. coli) in one dimension. Building on previous analyses at drift-diffusion level for the one-particle density, we add both interactions and noise, enabling discussion of domain formation by self-trapping, and other collective phenomena. Mapping onto detailed-balance systems is possible in certain cases.
Critical exponents of the infinitely slowly driven Zhang model of self-organized criticality are computed for $d=2,3$ with particular emphasis devoted to the various roughening exponents. Besides confirming recent estimates of some exponents, new quantities are monitored and their critical exponents computed. Among other results, it is shown that the three dimensional exponents do not coincide with the Bak, Tang, and Wiesenfeld (abelian) model and that the dynamical exponent as computed from the correlation length and from the roughness of the energy profile do not necessarily coincide as it is usually implicitly assumed. An explanation for this is provided. The possibility of comparing these results with those obtained from Renormalization Group arguments is also briefly addressed.
A self-organized model with social percolation process is proposed to describe the propagations of information for different trading ways across a social system and the automatic formation of various groups within market traders. Based on the market structure of this model, some stylized observations of real market can be reproduced, including the slow decay of volatility correlations, and the fat tail distribution of price returns which is found to cross over to an exponential-type asymptotic decay in different dimensional systems.