Physics – Biological Physics
Scientific paper
2011-05-12
in Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science, pp. 1738-1774, Robert A. Meyers Ed., Springer New York (2009). ISBN: 978-0-3
Physics
Biological Physics
31 pages, 16 figures, 295 references
Scientific paper
10.1007/978-0-387-30440-3_112
The present article is an invited contribution to the Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science, Robert A. Meyers Ed., Springer New York (2009). It is a review of the biophysical mechanisms that underly cell motility. It mainly focuses on the eukaryotic cytoskeleton and cell-motility mechanisms. Bacterial motility as well as the composition of the prokaryotic cytoskeleton is only briefly mentioned. The article is organized as follows. In Section III, I first present an overview of the diversity of cellular motility mechanisms, which might at first glance be categorized into two different types of behaviors, namely "swimming" and "crawling". Intracellular transport, mitosis - or cell division - as well as other extensions of cell motility that rely on the same essential machinery are briefly sketched. In Section IV, I introduce the molecular machinery that underlies cell motility - the cytoskeleton - as well as its interactions with the external environment of the cell and its main regulatory pathways. Sections IV D to IV F are more detailed in their biochemical presentations; readers primarily interested in the theoretical modeling of cell motility might want to skip these sections in a first reading. I then describe the motility mechanisms that rely essentially on polymerization-depolymerization dynamics of cytoskeleton filaments in Section V, and the ones that rely essentially on the activity of motor proteins in Section VI. Finally, Section VII is devoted to the description of the integrated approaches that have been developed recently to try to understand the cooperative phenomena that underly self-organization of the cell cytoskeleton as a whole.
No associations
LandOfFree
Cytoskeleton and Cell Motility does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.
If you have personal experience with Cytoskeleton and Cell Motility, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Cytoskeleton and Cell Motility will most certainly appreciate the feedback.
Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-496827