Biological Physics
Unraveling bacterial strategies for spatial exploration is crucial for understanding the complexity in the organization of life. Bacterial motility determines the spatio-temporal structure of microbial communities, controls infection…
Surface-driven flows are ubiquitous in nature, from subcellular cytoplasmic streaming to organ-scale ciliary arrays. Here, we model how confined geometries can be used to engineer complex hydrodynamic patterns driven by activity prescribed…
X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) promise the diffractive imaging of single molecules and nanoparticles with atomic spatial resolution. This relies on the averaging of millions of diffraction patterns of identical particles, which should…
For long it has been known that specific patterns of folding are necessary for an optimally functioning brain. For instance, lissencephaly and polymicrogyria can lead to severe mental retardation, short life expectancy, epileptic seizures,…
Unfolding of a coarse grained COVN protein from its native configuration shows a linear response with increasing temperature followed by a nonmonotonic double peaks in its radius of gyration. The protein conforms to a random coil of folded…
The discovery of magnetic protein provides a new understanding of a biocompass at the molecular level. However, the mechanism by which magnetic protein enables a biocompass is still under debate, mainly because of the absence of permanent…
Previous self-assembly experiments on a model icosahedral plant virus have shown that, under physiological conditions, capsid proteins initially bind to the genome through an en masse mechanism and form nucleoprotein complexes in a…
Resistive Pulse Sensing (RPS) is a key label-free technology to measure particles and single-cell size distribution. As a growing corpus of evidence supports that cancer cells exhibit distinct mechanical phenotypes from healthy cells,…
Biological cells in living tissues form dynamic patterns with local orientational order and topological defects. Here we demonstrate an approach to produce cell monolayer with the predesigned orientational patterns using human dermal…
Cells possess non-membrane-bound bodies, many of which are now understood as phase-separated condensates. One class of such condensates is composed of two polymer species, where each consists of repeated binding sites that interact in a…
The electromagnetic potential is the only force relevant to understand polyelectrolytes and it should enables us to reveal all polyelectrolytes properties. We argue that dielectric spectroscopy probes the average dipole moment of the pure…
Motivated by the dynamics of particles embedded in active gels, both in-vitro and inside the cytoskeleton of living cells, we study an active generalization of the classical trap model. We demonstrate that activity leads to dramatic…
We present a theory of chemokinetic search agents that regulate directional fluctuations according to distance from a target. A dynamic scattering effect reduces the probability to penetrate regions with high fluctuations and thus search…
The motility mechanism of certain rod-shaped bacteria has long been a mystery, since no external appendages are involved in their motion which is known as gliding. However, the physical principles behind gliding motility still remain poorly…
Mechanosensitive channels are ion channels activated by membrane tension. We investigate the influence of bacterial mechanosensitive channels spatial distribution on activation (gating). Based on elastic short-range interactions we map this…
A guiding principle in self-assembly is that, for high production yield, nucleation of structures must be significantly slower than their growth. However, details of the mechanism that impedes nucleation are broadly considered irrelevant.…
Microswimmers are exposed in nature to crowded environments and their transport properties depend in a subtle way on the interaction with obstacles. Here, we investigate a model for a single ideal circle swimmer exploring a two-dimensional…
In this work, a generalization of the study of the human gait was made from already existent models in the literature, like models of Keller and Kockshenev. In this hybrid model, a strategy of metabolic energy minimization is combined in a…
Previous work has suggested that disordered swarms of flying insects can be well modeled as self-gravitating systems, as long as the "gravitational" interaction is adaptive. Motivated by this work we compare the predictions of the classic,…
In single-molecule force spectroscopy experiments, the dependence of the mean unfolding force on the loading rate is used for obtaining information about the energetic and dynamic properties of the system under study. However, it is crucial…