Synapses are dynamic molecular assemblies whose sizes fluctuate significantly over time-scales of hours and days. In the current study, we examined the possibility that the spontaneous microscopic dynamics exhibited by synaptic molecules can explain the macroscopic size fluctuations of individual synapses and the statistical properties of synaptic populations. We present a mesoscopic model, which ties the two levels. Its basic premise is that synaptic size fluctuations reflect cooperative assimilation and removal of molecules at a patch of postsynaptic membrane. The introduction of cooperativity to both assimilation and removal in a stochastic biophysical model of these processes, gives rise to features qualitatively similar to those measured experimentally: nanoclusters of synaptic scaffolds, fluctuations in synaptic sizes, skewed, stable size distributions and their scaling in response to perturbations. Our model thus points to the potentially fundamental role of cooperativity in dictating synaptic remodeling dynamics and offers a conceptual understanding of these dynamics in terms of central microscopic features and processes.

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Therapeutic nanotechnologies have made great progress over the past decade. Skepticism has been replaced by the understanding that precision at the nanoscale allows improved treatment modalities in humans. Principles for designing tumor‐targeted drug delivery systems are described. At first, the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect was the major targeting mode, with up to 10 % of the injected dose actually reaching tumors. To improve cellular uptake, sugars, antibodies, peptides or other ligands were added to the surface of nanotherapeutics. These can be coupled with external magnetic fields or ultrasonic waves to propel iron oxide or gas‐filled particles towards the disease site. Next‐generation drug delivery systems will be capable of autonomously swimming towards the disease site and penetrating deep tissue, independent of blood or lymphatic flow. This has been shown to some extent with modified, drug‐producing, bacteria. Interestingly, sperm may be nature’s best example of a multifunctional, targeted, high‐fidelity, self‐propelled, delivery system that we can learn from.

Homeostasis, the ability to maintain a relatively constant internal environment in the face of perturbations, is a hallmark of biological systems. It is believed that this constancy is achieved through multiple internal regulation and control processes. Given observations of a system, or even a detailed model of one, it is both valuable and extremely challenging to extract the control objectives of the homeostatic mechanisms. In this work, we develop a robust data-driven method to identify these objectives, namely to understand: “what does the system care about?”. We propose an algorithm, Identifying Regulation with Adversarial Surrogates (IRAS), that receives an array of temporal measurements of the system and outputs a candidate for the control objective, expressed as a combination of observed variables. IRAS is an iterative algorithm consisting of two competing players. The first player, realized by an artificial deep neural network, aims to minimize a measure of invariance we refer to as the coefficient of regulation. The second player aims to render the task of the first player more difficult by forcing it to extract information about the temporal structure of the data, which is absent from similar “surrogate” data. We test the algorithm on four synthetic and one natural data set, demonstrating excellent empirical results. Interestingly, our approach can also be used to extract conserved quantities, e.g., energy and momentum, in purely physical systems, as we demonstrate empirically.

Phenotypic switches are associated with alterations in the cell's gene expression profile and are vital to many aspects of biology. Previous studies have identified local motifs of the genetic regulatory network that could underlie such switches. Recent advancements allowed the study of networks at the global, many-gene, level; however, the relationship between the local and global scales in giving rise to phenotypic switches remains elusive. In this work, we studied the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) using a gene regulatory network model. This model supports two clusters of stable steady-states identified with the epithelial and mesenchymal phenotypes, and a range of intermediate less stable hybrid states, whose importance in cancer has been recently highlighted. Using an array of network perturbations and quantifying the resulting landscape, we investigated how features of the network at different levels give rise to these landscape properties. We found that local connectivity patterns affect the landscape in a mostly incremental manner; in particular, a specific previously identified double-negative feedback motif is not required when embedded in the full network, because the landscape is maintained at a global level. Nevertheless, despite the distributed nature of the switch, it is possible to find combinations of a few local changes that disrupt it. At the level of network architecture, we identified a crucial role for peripheral genes that act as incoming signals to the network in creating clusters of states. Such incoming signals are a signature of modularity and are expected to appear also in other biological networks. Hybrid states between epithelial and mesenchymal arise in the model due to barriers in the interaction between genes, causing hysteresis at all connections. Our results suggest emergent switches can neither be pinpointed to local motifs, nor do they arise as typical properties of random network ensembles. Rather, they arise through an interplay between the nature of local interactions, and the core-periphery structure induced by the modularity of the cell.