spatio-temporal organisation of living systems

The traditional approach to understanding cellular processes is often to identify the proteins and other molecules implicated and to measure the reaction rates between the different players. An important feature that is miss- ing in this kind of approach is the way spatial and temporal informations are correlated by diffusion or active transport processes. This spatio-temporal coupling seems particularly important for many aspects of cellular organisation, and could in particular play a crucial role in controlling the distribution, size and dynamics of exchange between cellular organelles, or the formation of protein clusters in the cytoplasm or at the cell membrane. Cells and sub-cellular compartments are open systems able to synthesize or degrade their constituents, and experiencing energy-consuming exchange of material with their surrounding Such systems raise novel and important physical questions, which are of direct biological interest. Our team is investigating different ways by which the coupling between different passive and active kinetic processes such as diffusion, phase separation, enzymatic activity, fusion and scission events as well as active force generation and transport, may give rise to non-equilibrium steady states that may react very sensitively to changes in the environment. These problems are relevant to a broad range of cellular phenomena such as transcription-translation, signalling and compartmentalization, which we study in collaboration with biologists. 

Recent works

- Q. Vagne, J.-P. Vrel and P. Sens,  eLife,2020;9:e47318:

A Minimal Self-Organized model for the Golgi Apparatus

see a presentation of this work on youtube

- Q. Vagne and P. Sens,  Phys. Rev. Let. 120, 058102  (2018)

Stochastic Models of Vesicular Sorting in Cellular Organelles

- Q. Vagne and P. Sens, Biophys. J.  Biophys. J. 114, 947-957  (2018)

Stochastic Model of Maturation and Vesicular Exchange in Cellular Organelles

- Q. Vagne, M. S. Turner and P. Sens, PLoS ONE 10 (2015) e0143470:

Sensing size through clustering in non-equilibrium membranes and the control of membrane-bound enzymatic reactions.

- S. Dmitrieff, M. Rao and P. Sens. PNAS. 110 (2013), 15692–15697

Quantitative analysis of intra-Golgi transport shows intercisternal exchange for all cargo