L. Laan
23 records found
1
Authored
In this Perspective, Journal of Cell Science invited researchers working on cell and tissue polarity to share their thoughts on unique, emerging or open questions relating to their field. The goal of this article is to feature 'voices' from scientists around the world and at v ...
How can a self-organized cellular function evolve, adapt to perturbations, and acquire new sub-functions? To make progress in answering these basic questions of evolutionary cell biology, we analyze, as a concrete example, the cell polarity machinery of Saccharomyces cerevisia ...
Accurate phenotype prediction based on genetic information has numerous societal applications, such as crop design or cellular factories. Epistasis, when biological components interact, complicates modelling phenotypes from genotypes. Here we show an approach to mitigate this ...
Cellular life exhibits order and complexity, which typically increase over the course of evolution. Cell polarization is a well-studied example of an ordering process that breaks the internal symmetry of a cell by establishing a preferential axis. Like many cellular processes, ...
Towards evolutionary predictions
Current promises and challenges
Evolution has traditionally been a historical and descriptive science, and predicting future evolutionary processes has long been considered impossible. However, evolutionary predictions are increasingly being developed and used in medicine, agriculture, biotechnology and cons ...
Phase separation has emerged as an essential concept for the spatial organization inside biological cells. However, despite the clear relevance to virtually all physiological functions, we understand surprisingly little about what phases form in a system of many interacting co ...
Reliably distinguishing between cells based on minute differences in receptor density is crucial for cell-cell or virus-cell recognition, the initiation of signal transduction, and selective targeting in directed drug delivery. Such sharp differentiation between different surf ...
The limits of evolution have long fascinated biologists. However, the causes of evolutionary constraint have remained elusive due to a poor mechanistic understanding of studied phenotypes. Recently, a range of innovative approaches have leveraged mechanistic information on reg ...
A bottom-up route towards predicting evolution relies on a deep understanding of the complex network that proteins form inside cells. In a rapidly expanding panorama of experimental possibilities, the most difficult question is how to conceptually approach the disentangling of ...
Cell polarity - the morphological and functional differentiation of cellular compartments in a directional manner - is required for processes such as orientation of cell division, directed cellular growth and motility. How the interplay of components within the complexity of a ...
In stationary-phase Escherichia coli, Dps (DNA-binding protein from starved cells) is the most abundant protein component of the nucleoid. Dps compacts DNA into a dense complex and protects it from damage. Dps has also been proposed to act as a global regulator of transcriptio ...
Microtubules are dynamic cytoskeletal polymers that polymerize and depolymerize while interacting with different proteins and structures within the cell. The highly regulated dynamic properties as well as the pushing and pulling forces generated by dynamic microtubule ends pla ...
Polarity establishment underlies proper cell cycle completion across virtually all organisms. Much progress has been made in generating an understanding of the structural and functional components of this process, especially in model species. Here we focus on the evolutionary ...