Biological Physics
Chemically or optically powered active matter plays an increasingly important role in materials design but its computational potential has yet to be explored systematically. The competition between energy consumption and dissipation imposes…
Experimental records of active bundle motility are used to demonstrate the presence of a low-dimensional chaotic attractor in hair cell dynamics. Dimensionality tests from dynamic systems theory are applied to estimate the number of…
Thiol self assembled monolayers (SAMs) are widely used in many nano- and bio-technology applications. We report a new approach to create and characterize a thiol SAMs micropattern with alternating charges on a flat goldcoated substrate…
Using atomic force microscopy (AFM) we investigated the interaction of amyloid beta (Ab) (1 42) peptide with chemically modified surfaces in order to better understand the mechanism of amyloid toxicity, which involves interaction of amyloid…
The link between metals, Alzheimers disease (AD) and its implicated protein, amyloid \b{eta} (A\b{eta}), is complex and highly studied. AD is believed to occur as a result of the misfolding and aggregation of A\b{eta}. The dyshomeostasis of…
Superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs), due to their controllable sizes, relatively long in vivo half-life and limited agglomeration, are ideal for biomedical applications such as magnetic labeling, hyperthermia cancer…
Metal ions, including copper and zinc, have been implicated in the pathogenesis of Alzheimers disease through a variety of mechanisms including increased amyloid \b{eta} affinity and redox effects. Recent reports have demonstrated that the…
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a devastating neurodegenerative disorder with no cure and limited treatment solutions that are unable to target any of the suspected causes. Increasing evidence suggests that one of the causes of…
Membrane proteins and lipids can self-assemble into membrane protein polyhedral nanoparticles (MPPNs). MPPNs have a closed spherical surface and a polyhedral protein arrangement, and may offer a new route for structure determination of…
In recent experiments [T. Basta et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 111, 670 (2014)] lipids and membrane proteins were observed to self-assemble into membrane protein polyhedral nanoparticles (MPPNs) with a well-defined polyhedral protein…
Organic material in anoxic sediment represents a globally significant carbon reservoir that acts to stabilize Earth's atmospheric composition. The dynamics by which microbes organize to consume this material remain poorly understood. Here…
Sensory mechanisms in biology, from cells to humans, have the property of adaptivity, whereby the response produced by the sensor is adapted to the overall amplitude of the signal; reducing the sensitivity in the presence of strong…
A system with many degrees of freedom can be characterized by a covariance matrix; principal components analysis (PCA) focuses on the eigenvalues of this matrix, hoping to find a lower dimensional description. But when the spectrum is…
Aggregation of amphiphiles through the action of hydrophobic interactions is a common feature in soft condensed matter systems and is of particular importance in the context of biophysics as it underlies both the generation of functional…
The investigation of a dilute solution of phantom ideal ring polymers and ring polymers with excluded volume interactions (EVI) in a good solvent confined in a slit geometry of two parallel repulsive walls and in a solution of colloidal…
Fluorescence microscopy reveals that the contents of many (membrane-free) nuclear "bodies" exchange rapidly with the soluble pool whilst the underlying structure persists; such observations await a satisfactory biophysical explanation. To…
It has been proposed that during the early steps in the origin of life, small droplets could have formed via the segregation of molecules from complex mixtures by phase separation. These droplets could have provided chemical reaction…
DNA is an essential molecule central to the survival and propagation of life, it was imperative to investigate possible electromagnetic properties inherent to it, such as the existence of any non-trivial interactions of this molecule with…
Membrane proteins constitute a large portion of the human proteome and perform a variety of important functions as membrane receptors, transport proteins, enzymes, signaling proteins, and more. The computational studies of membrane proteins…
A computational framework integrating optimization algorithms, parallel computing and plant physiology was developed to explore crop ideotype design. The backbone of the framework is a plant physiology model that accurately tracks water use…