Biological Physics
In many insect species, the thoracic structure plays a crucial role in enabling flight. In the dipteran indirect flight mechanism, the thorax acts as a transmission link between the flight muscles and the wings, and it is often thought to…
Transient absorption (TA) spectroscopy has proved fundamental to our understanding of energy and charge transfer in biological systems, allowing measurements of photoactive proteins on sub-picosecond timescales. Recently, ultrafast TA…
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic, disabling and incurable autoimmune disease. It has been widely recognized that gut microbial dysbiosis is an important contributor to the pathogenesis of RA, although distinct alterations in…
A biophysical issue how the nuclear size dynamically scales with the cellular size remains mysterious. We develop a theoretical framework in which the interactions between polydisperse biomolecules and the mechanical elasticity of the cell…
Short-range interactions and long-range contacts drive the 3D folding of structured proteins. The proteins' structure has a direct impact on their biological function. However, nearly 40% of the eukaryotes proteome is composed of…
Photosystems II and I (PSII and PSI) are the reaction centre complexes that drive the light reactions of photosynthesis. PSII performs light-driven water oxidation (quantum efficiencies and catalysis rates of up to 80% and 1000…
The mechanism by which cells measure the dimension of the organ in which they are embedded, and slow down their growth when the final size is reached, is a long-standing problem of developmental biology. The role of mechanics in this…
We combine stochastic thermodynamics, large deviation theory, and information theory to derive fundamental limits on the accuracy with which single cell receptors can estimate external concentrations. As expected, if estimation is performed…
Nonequilibrium energetics of single molecule translational motor kinesin was investigated by measuring heat dissipation from the violation of the fluctuation-response relation of a probe attached to the motor using optical tweezers. The sum…
Many eukaryotic cells chemotax, sensing and following chemical gradients. However, experiments have shown that even under conditions when single cells cannot chemotax, small clusters may still follow a gradient. This behavior has been…
Many proteins and peptides have an intrinsic capacity to sense and induce membrane curvature, and play crucial roles for organizing and remodelling cell membranes. However, the molecular driving forces behind these processes are not well…
Understanding tumor invasion and metastasis is of crucial importance for both fundamental cancer research and clinical practice. In vitro experiments have established that the invasive growth of malignant tumors is characterized by the…
We analyze the response of the Morris-Lecar model to a periodic train of short current pulses in the period-amplitude plane. For a wide parameter range encompassing both class 2 and class 3 behavior in Hodgkin's classification there is a…
Transcription is a complex phenomenon that permits the conversion of genetic information into phenotype by means of an enzyme called RNA polymerase, which erratically moves along and scans the DNA template. We perform Bayesian inference…
Over recent years, super-resolution and single-molecule imaging methods have delivered unprecedented details on the nanoscale organization and dynamics of individual molecules in different contexts. Yet, visualizing single-molecule…
Transport of intensity equation (TIE) exhibits a non-interferometric correlation between intensity and phase variations of intermediate fields (e.g., light and electron) in biological imaging. Previous TIE formulations have generally…
Biofilms are communities of microorganisms that grow on virtually all surfaces with sufficient nutrients including aquatic and industrial water systems and medical devices. Biofilms are complex, structured communities where the interplay of…
A variety of living and non-living systems exhibit collective motion. From swarm robotics to bacterial swarms, and tissue wound healing to human crowds, examples of collective motion are highly diverse but all of them share the common…
Biomolecular condensates constitute a newly recognized form of spatial organization in living cells. Although many condensates are believed to form as a result of phase separation, the physicochemical properties that determine the phase…
The ability of cells to reorganize in response to external stimuli is important in areas ranging from morphogenesis to tissue engineering. Elongated cells can co-align due to steric effects, forming states with local order. We show that…