Biological Physics
Molecular motors walk along filaments until they detach stochastically with a force-dependent unbinding rate. Here, we show that this unbinding rate can be obtained from the analysis of experimental data of molecular motors moving in…
Interactions mediated by the cell membrane between inclusions, such as membrane proteins or antimicrobial peptides, play important roles in their biological activity. They also constitute a fascinating challenge for physicists, since they…
A major hallmark of neural development is the oscillatory movement of nuclei between the apical and basal surfaces of the neuroepithelium during the process of interkinetic nuclear migration (IKNM). Here, we employ long-term, rapid…
Cellular metabolic rate is a good indicator of the physiological state of cells and its changes, which can be measured by total heat flux accompanying metabolism. Chip calorimeters can provide label-free and high throughput measurements of…
A fifteen state kinetic model for Na+ channel gating that describes the coupling between three activation sensors, a two-stage fast inactivation process and slow inactivated states, may be reduced to equations for a six state system by…
Oral squamous cell carcinomas (OSCC) are the 6th most common cancer and the diagnosis is often belated for a curative treatment. The reliable and early differentiation between healthy and diseased cells is the main aim of this study in…
We perform a numerical analysis of a recent introduced model for describing collective movement in alarmed animals groups. This model, derived from a position-based interaction and a limited attention field, displays a non-equilibrium phase…
Overstretching of B-DNA is currently understood as force-induced melting. Depending on the geometry of the stretching experiment, the force threshold for the overstretching transition is around 65 or 110 pN. Although the mechanisms behind…
The artificial axon is a recently introduced synthetic assembly of supported lipid bilayers and voltage gated ion channels, displaying the basic electrophysiology of nerve cells. Here we demonstrate the use of two artificial axons as…
A fundamental goal of microbial ecology is to understand what determines the diversity, stability, and structure of microbial ecosystems. The microbial context poses special conceptual challenges because of the strong mutual influences…
Propagating interfaces are ubiquitous in nature, underlying instabilities and pattern formation in biology and material science. Physical principles governing interface growth are well understood in passive settings; however, our…
During development of biological organisms, multiple complex structures are formed. In many instances, these structures need to exhibit a high degree of order to be functional, although many of their constituents are intrinsically…
We map a class of well-mixed stochastic models of biochemical feedback in steady state to the mean-field Ising model near the critical point. The mapping provides an effective temperature, magnetic field, order parameter, and heat capacity…
During the spreading of epithelial tissues, the advancing tissue front often develops fingerlike protrusions. Their resemblance to traditional viscous fingering patterns in driven fluids suggests that epithelial fingers could arise from an…
The spatial organization of bacteria in dense biofilms is key to their collective behaviour, and understanding it will be important for medical and technological applications. Here we study the morphology of a compact biofilm that undergoes…
Iron biomineralisation is critical for life. Nature capitalises on the physical attributes of iron biominerals for a variety of functional, structural and sensory applications. Although magnetism is an integral property of iron biominerals,…
Stimulated low-frequency Raman scattering can give essential information about the elastic properties of different nanoparticles systems, in particular, biological nanostructures. In the present study, low-frequency vibrational modes in…
Enzymes speed up biochemical reactions at the core of life by as much as 15 orders of magnitude. Yet, despite considerable advances, the fine dynamical determinants at the microscopic level of their catalytic proficiency are still elusive.…
(200 words) Oxidation of unsaturated lipids is a fundamental process involved in cell bioenergetics as well as in cell death. Using giant unilamellar vesicles and a chlorin photosensitizer, we asymmetrically oxidized the outer or inner…
In many realistic systems, maximum entropy principle (MEP) analysis provides an effective characterization of the probability distribution of network states. However, to implement the MEP analysis, a sufficiently long-time data recording in…