Biological Physics
Hydrogels have the ability to undergo large deformations and yet fail like brittle materials. The development of biocompatible hydrogels with high strength and toughness is an ongoing challenge in many applications. We crosslinked bovine…
Carpets of beating cilia represent a paradigmatic example of self-organized synchronization of noisy biological oscillators, characterized by traveling waves of cilia phase. We present a multi-scale model of a cilia carpet, which comprises…
G-quadruplexes (G4s) are helical four-stranded structures forming from guanine-rich nucleic acid sequences, which are thought to play a role in cancer development and malignant transformation. Most current studies focus on G4 monomers, yet…
Plasma activated medium, containing reactive oxygen species (ROS) and reactive nitrogen species (RNS), has been used for cancer treatment as an indirect treatment method. Here we report cold atmospheric plasma (CAP) activated deionized (DI)…
The cellular milieu is teeming with biochemical nano-machines whose activity is a strong source of correlated non-thermal fluctuations termed active noise. Essential elements of this circuitry are enzymes, catalysts that speed up the rate…
We introduce an idealized model of an intelligent forager in which higher intelligence corresponds to a larger spatial range over which the forager can detect food. Such a forager diffuses randomly whenever the nearest food is more distant…
Many biological processes discriminate between correct and incorrect substrates through the kinetic proofreading mechanism which enables lower error at the cost of higher energy dissipation. Elucidating physicochemical constraints for…
We address the problem of evaluating the transfer entropy (TE) produced by biochemical reactions from experimentally measured data. Although these reactions are generally non-linear and non-stationary processes making it challenging to…
Calculating the mean exit time (MET) for models of diffusion is a classical problem in statistical physics, with various applications in biophysics, economics and heat and mass transfer. While many exact results for MET are known for…
Load-bearing tissues are typically fortified by networks of protein fibers, often with preferential orientations. This fiber structure imparts the tissues with direction-dependent mechanical properties optimized to support specific external…
The computer simulation of organ-scale biomechanistic models of cancer personalized via routinely collected clinical and imaging data enables to obtain patient-specific predictions of tumor growth and treatment response over the anatomy of…
Temporal order in living matters reflects the self-organizing nature of dynamical processes driven out of thermodynamic equilibrium. Because of functional reason, the period of a biochemical oscillation must be tuned to a specific value…
We review the trade-offs between speed, fluctuations, and thermodynamic cost involved with biological processes in nonequilibrium states, and discuss how optimal these processes are in light of the universal bound set by the thermodynamic…
Due to large fluctuations in cellular environments, transfer of information in biological processes without regulation is inherently error-prone. The mechanistic details of error-reducing mechanisms in biological copying processes have been…
Organic molecules are widely present in the dense interstellar medium, and many have been synthesized in the laboratory on Earth under the conditions typical for an interstellar environment. Until now, however, only relatively small…
The SARS CoV-2 virus emerged at the end of 2019 and rapidly developed several mutated variants, specifically the Delta and Omicron, which demonstrate higher infectivity and escalating infection cases worldwide. The dominant transmission…
Both classical and quantum electrodynamics predict the existence of dipole-dipole long-range electrodynamic intermolecular forces; however, these have never been hitherto experimentally observed. The discovery of completely new and…
ATP synthase's intrinsic molecular electrostatic potential (MESP) adds constructively to, and hence reinforces, the chemiosmotic voltage. This ATP synthase voltage represents a new free energy term that appears to have been overlooked. This…
Previous studies of the flexibilities of ancestral proteins suggests that proteins evolve their function by altering their native state ensemble. Here we propose a more direct method of visualizing this by measuring the changes in the…
We consider motility of keratocyte cells driven by myosin contraction and introduce a 2D free boundary model for such motion. This model generalizes a 1D model from [12] by combining a 2D Keller-Segel model and a Hele-Shaw type boundary…