Biological Physics
It has been suggested that 31P nuclear spins in Ca9(PO4)6 molecules could form the basis of a quantum mechanism for neural processing in the brain. A fundamental requirement of this proposal is that spins in different Ca9(PO4)6 molecules…
Soaring migrants exploit columns of rising air (thermals) to cover large distances with minimal energy. Employing social information while locating thermals may be beneficial, but examining collective movements in wild migrants has been a…
It is a common incident in nature, that two waves or pulses run into each other head-on. The outcome of such an event is of special interest, because it allows conclusions about the underlying physical nature of the pulses. The present…
The excitation of many cells and tissues is associated with cell mechanical changes. The evidence presented herein corroborates that single cells deform during an action potential (AP). It is demonstrated that excitation of plant cells…
Spatial variations in the electrical properties of cardiac tissue can occur because of cardiac diseases. We introduce such gradients into mathematical models for cardiac tissue and then study, by extensive numerical simulations, their…
Rebinding kinetics of molecular ligands plays a critical role in biomachinery, from regulatory networks to protein transcription, and is also a key factor for designing drugs and high-precision biosensors.In this study, we investigate…
It is shown that quantum sustainability is a universal phenomenon which emerges during environment-assisted electronic excitation energy transfer (EET) in photobiological complexes (PBCs), such as photosynthetic reaction centers and centers…
We present a model of proton tunnelling across DNA hydrogen bonds, compute the characteristic tunnelling time (CTT) from donor to acceptor and discuss its biological implications. The model is a double oscillator characterised by three…
Life and functioning of higher organisms depends on the continuous supply of metabolites to tissues and organs. What are the requirements on the transport network pervading a tissue to provide a uniform supply of nutrients, minerals, or…
A key process in the life of any multicellular organism is its development from a single egg into a full grown adult. The first step in this process often consists of forming a tissue layer out of randomly placed cells on the surface of the…
The fluctuation theorem is a representative theorem in non-equilibrium statistical physics actively studied in the 1990's. Relating to entropy production in non-equilibrium states, the theorem has been used to estimate the driving power of…
Assuming that the selectivity filter of KcsA potassium ion channel may exhibit quantum coherence, we extend a previous model by Vaziri and Plenio (2010) to take into account Coulomb repulsion between potassium ions. We show that typical ion…
For navigation, microscopic agents such as biological cells rely on noisy sensory input. In cells performing chemotaxis, such noise arises from the stochastic binding of signaling molecules at low concentrations. Using chemotaxis of sperm…
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiments on subnanoliter (sub-nL) volumes are hindered by the limited sensitivity of the detector and the difficulties in positioning and holding such small samples in proximity of the detector. Here, we…
Sample-induced image-degradation remains an intricate wave-optical problem in light-sheet microscopy. Here we present biobeam, an open-source software package that enables to simulate operational light-sheet microscopes by combining data…
As an injury heals, an embryo develops, or a carcinoma spreads, epithelial cells systematically change their shape. In each of these processes cell shape is studied extensively, whereas variation of shape from cell-to-cell is dismissed most…
In genome mapping experiments, long DNA molecules are stretched by confining them to very narrow channels, so that the locations of sequence-specific fluorescent labels along the channel axis provide large-scale genomic information. It is…
Fe3O4@astragalus polysaccharide core-shell nanoparticles (Fe3O4@APS NPs) were demonstrated to be an efficient therapeutic drug for treating iron deficiency anemia (IDA) in vivo. The Fe3O4@APS NPs have been synthesized using a two steps…
It is shown that the density of modes of the vibrational spectrum of globular proteins is universal, i.e., regardless of the protein in question it closely follows one universal curve. The present study, including 135 proteins analyzed with…
We study translocation of semiflexible polymers driven by force $f_d$ inside a nanometer-scale pore using our three-dimensional Langevin dynamics model. We show that the translocation time $\tau$ increases with increasing bending rigidity…