Biological Physics
Initiating replication synchronously at multiple origins of replication allows the bacterium Escherichia coli to divide even faster than the time it takes to replicate the entire chromosome in nutrient-rich environments. What mechanisms…
We propose a combination of microrheological and structural characterizations of fibrin networks to study blood hypercoagulability. Fibrin is the central element of coagulation as its polymerization creates the network of fibers in which…
Approximately half of the existing winged-insect species are of very small size (wing length about 0.3-4 mm); they are referred to as miniature insects. Yet until recently, much of what we know about the mechanics of insect flight was…
In neuroscience, it is of interest to consider all possible modes of information transfer between neurons in order to fully understand processing in the brain. It has been suggested that photonic communication may be possible along axonal…
Experiments have found that diffusion in metabolically active cells is much faster than in dormant cells, especially for large particles. However, the mechanism of this size-dependent diffusion enhancement in living cells is still unclear.…
Enzyme-enriched condensates can organize the spatial distribution of their substrates by catalyzing non-equilibrium reactions. Conversely, an inhomogeneous substrate distribution induces enzyme fluxes through substrate-enzyme interactions.…
Locomotion is typically studied either in continuous media where bodies and legs experience forces generated by the flowing medium, or on solid substrates dominated by friction. In the former, centralized coordination is believed to…
Life is a nonequilibrium phenomenon: metabolism provides a continuous supply of energy that drives nearly all cellular processes. However, very little is known about how much energy different cellular processes use, i.e. their energetic…
Computational protein design facilitates discovery of novel proteins with prescribed structure and functionality. Exciting designs were recently reported using novel data-driven methodologies that can be roughly divided into two categories:…
Orientational order, encoded in anisotropic fields, plays an important role during the development of an organism. A striking example of this is the freshwater polyp Hydra, where topological defects in the muscle fiber orientation have been…
Over the past few years it has been demonstrated that "coarse timesteppers" establish a link between traditional numerical analysis and microscopic/ stochastic simulation. The underlying assumption of the associated…
Enrolling patients in clinical trials to obtain fresh tumor biopsies to profile anticancer agents can be slow and expensive. However, if flash-frozen biopsies can be thawed to produce viable living tissue with relevant biodynamic profiles,…
Numerous ingenious engineering designs and devices have been the product of bio-inspiration. Bone, nacre, and other such stiff structural biological materials (SSBMs) are composites that contain mineral and organic materials interlaid…
A popular hypothesis ascribes magnetoreception to a magnetosensitive recombination reaction of a pair of radicals in the protein cryptochrome. Many theoretical studies of this model have ignored inter-radical interactions, particularly the…
Common models of circadian rhythms are constructed as compartmental reactions of well mixed biochemicals involving a negative-feedback loop containing several intermediate reaction steps in order to enable oscillations. Spatial transport of…
In order to grow in any given environment, bacteria need to collect information about the medium composition and implement suitable growth strategies by adjusting their regulatory and metabolic degrees of freedom. In the standard sense,…
While allostery is of paramount importance for protein signaling and regulation, the underlying dynamical process of allosteric communication is not well understood. PDZ3 domain represents a prime example of an allosteric single-domain…
Aspects of cell metabolism are modeled by ordinary differential equations describing the change of intracellular chemical concentrations. There is a correspondence between this dynamical system and a complex network. As in the classic…
Synaptic noise plays a major role in setting up coexistence of various firing patterns, but the precise mechanisms whereby these synaptic noise contributes to coexisting firing activities are subtle and remain elusive. To investigate these…
In this manuscript we describe the investigation of the SARS-CoV2 membrane fusion timescale by means of small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) using hydrogen/deuterium contrast variation. After the successful production of virus-like…