Spatial and structural metrics for living cells inspired by statistical mechanics
Date
06/10/2016Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Experimental observations in cell biology have advanced to a stage where theory could play a larger role, much as it has done in the physical sciences. Possibly the lack of a common framework within which experimentalists, computational scientists and theorists could equally contribute has hindered this development, for the worse of both disciplines. Here we demonstrate the usage of tools and concepts from statistical mechanics to describe processes inside living cells based on experimental data, suggesting that future theoretical/computational models may be based on such concepts. To illustrate the ideas, we describe the organisation of subcellular structures within the cell in terms of (density) pair correlation functions, and subsequently use the same concepts to follow nano-sized objects being transported inside the cell. Finally, we quantify an interesting subcellular re-organisation, not previously discerned by molecular biology methods.
Citation
Åberg , C , Varela , J A , Fitzpatrick , L W & Dawson , K A 2016 , ' Spatial and structural metrics for living cells inspired by statistical mechanics ' , Scientific Reports , vol. 6 , 34457 . https://doi.org/10.1038/srep34457
Publication
Scientific Reports
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2045-2322Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2016. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Description
Funding from the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (C.Å.); Science Foundation Ireland, 09/RFP/MTR2425 (J.A.V.; C.Å.) and 12/IA/1422 (K.A.D.); the European Union Seventh Framework Programme project NanoTransKinetics, grant agreement no. 266737 (C.Å.) and FutureNanoNeeds grant agreement no. 604602 (K.A.D.); and the Irish Research Council (L.W.F.) is gratefully acknowledged.Collections
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