Biological Physics
Many bacteria are motile by means of one or more rotating rigid helical flagella, making them the only known organism to use rotation as a means of propulsion. The rotation is supplied by the bacterial flagellar motor, a particularly…
The functioning of machines typically requires a concerted action of their parts. This requirement also holds for molecular motors that drive vital cellular processes and imposes constraints on their conformational changes as well as the…
The use of drugs or radiation to attack cancerous cells often leaves the treatment material within the body where it could affect healthy cells or damages healthy tissue; as is the case with traditional invasive surgery. An alternative…
The phase field model can accurately simulate the evolution of microstructures with complex morphologies, and it has been widely used for cell modeling in the last two decades. However, compared to other cellular models such as the…
High-spatial-resolution vibrational spectroscopy is one of the principal techniques for nanoscale compositional analysis in biological materials. Here, we present a new method for the analysis of whole-cell biological specimens through…
We review the computation models for biofilm and bacteria cells, providing perspectives on biofilm's various properties and potential serving as engineering living materials (ELMs), considering the omnipresence of such biological matter.…
Smoldering combustion plays a key role in wildfires in forests, grasslands, and peatlands due to its common occurrence in porous fuels like peat and duff. As a consequence, understanding smoldering behavior in these fuels is crucial. Such…
Establishing sharp and correctly positioned boundaries in spatial gene expression patterns is a central task, both in developmental and synthetic biology. We consider situations where a global morphogen gradient provides positional…
Cell division is an essential biological process, and regulation of cell division is of relevance for many important fields of biology and medicine. Introducing exogenous substances, such as nanoparticles, into the nucleus, has been…
The high energy consumption of electronic data processors, together with physical challenges limiting their further improvement, has triggered intensive interest in alternative computation paradigms. Here we focus on network-based…
In the May-Leonard model of three cyclically competing species, we analyze the statistics of rare events in which all three species go extinct due to strong but rare fluctuations. These fluctuations are from the tails of the probability…
Eukaryotic cells are mechanically supported by a polymer network called the cytoskeleton, which consumes chemical energy to dynamically remodel its structure. Recent experiments in vivo have revealed that this remodeling occasionally…
Ligand-receptor binding and unbinding are fundamental biomolecular processes and particularly essential to drug efficacy. Environmental water fluctuations, however, impact the corresponding thermodynamics and kinetics and thereby challenge…
The fungi disperse spores to move across landscapes and spore liberation takes different patterns. While many species release spores intermittently, others release spores at specific times of day or night according to intrinsic rhythms.…
The formation of self-organized patterns is key to the morphogenesis of multicellular organisms, although a comprehensive theory of biological pattern formation is still lacking. Here, we propose a minimal model combining tissue mechanics…
Animal cells in tissues are supported by biopolymer matrices, which typically exhibit highly nonlinear mechanical properties. While the linear elasticity of the matrix can significantly impact cell mechanics and functionality, it remains…
An important determinant of crop yields is the regulation of photosystem II (PSII) light harvesting by energy-dependent quenching (qE). However, the molecular details of excitation quenching have not been quantitatively connected to the…
Bacterial motility, and in particular repulsion or attraction towards specific chemicals, has been a subject of investigation for over 100 years, resulting in detailed understanding of bacterial chemotaxis and the corresponding sensory…
Viruses are incapable of autonomous energy production. Although many experimental studies make it clear that viruses are parasitic entities that hijack the host's molecular resources, a detailed estimate for the energetic cost of viral…
From biofilm and colony formation in bacteria to wound healing and embryonic development in multicellular organisms, groups of living cells must often move collectively. While considerable study has probed the biophysical mechanisms of how…