Related papers: Living Devices
To celebrate Hans Frauenfelder's achievements, we examine energy(-like) "landscapes" for complex living systems. Energy landscapes summarize all possible dynamics of some physical systems. Energy(-like) landscapes can explain some…
Molecular dynamics (MD) has become a powerful tool for studying biophysical systems, due to increasing computational power and availability of software. Although MD has made many contributions to better understanding these complex…
Advances in molecular technologies underlie an enormous growth in the size of data sets pertaining to biology and biomedicine. These advances parallel those in the deep learning subfield of machine learning. Components in the differentiable…
Biological systems reach organizational complexity that far exceeds the complexity of any known inanimate objects. Biological entities undoubtedly obey the laws of quantum physics and statistical mechanics. However, is modern physics…
The present view of biological phenomena is based on a biochemical paradigm that development of living organisms is defined by information stored in a molecular form as some genetic code. However, new discoveries indicate that biological…
Theoretical physics is the search for simple and universal mathematical descriptions of the natural world. In contrast, much of modern biology is an exploration of the complexity and diversity of life. For many, this contrast is prima facie…
Dynamical systems theory describes how interacting quantities change over time and space, from molecular oscillators to large-scale biological patterns. Such systems often involve nonlinear feedbacks, delays, and interactions across scales.…
Modern research in the life sciences is unthinkable without computational methods for extracting, quantifying and visualizing information derived from biological microscopy imaging data. In the past decade, we observed a dramatic increase…
Much of biology (and, indeed, all of science) is becoming increasingly computational. We tend to think of this in regards to algorithmic approaches and software tools, as well as increased computing power. There has also been a shift…
The unprecedented prowess of measurement techniques provides a detailed, multi-scale look into the depths of living systems. Understanding these avalanches of high-dimensional data -- by distilling underlying principles and mechanisms --…
Life is characterized by a myriad of complex dynamic processes allowing organisms to grow, reproduce, and evolve. Physical approaches for describing systems out of thermodynamic equilibrium have been increasingly applied to living systems,…
Systems Biology has emerged in the last years as a new holistic approach based on the global understanding of cells instead of only being focused on their individual parts (genes or proteins), to better understand the complexity of human…
Living systems continuously transform matter and energy through the chemical processes that constitute their metabolism. The overall metabolic rate of an organism correlates positively with its body mass, however both the exact scaling…
To illustrate the power of the biophysical approach in solving important problems in life science, I present here one of our current research projects as an example. We have developed special biophotonic techniques to study the dynamic…
Biophysical models describing complex, cellular phenomena typically include systems of nonlinear differential equations with many free parameters. While experimental measurements can fix some parameters, those describing internal cellular…
Systems biology models are useful models of complex biological systems that may require a large amount of experimental data to fit each model's parameters or to approximate a likelihood function. These models range from a few to thousands…
Using bioimaging technology, biologists have attempted to identify and document analytical interpretations that underlie biological phenomena in biological cells. Theoretical biology aims at distilling those interpretations into knowledge…
At the physiological level, aging is neither rigid nor unchangeable. Instead, the molecular and mechanisms driving aging are sufficiently plastic that a variety of diverse interventions--dietary, pharmaceutical, and genetic--have been…
Dynamics is central to living systems. In the last two decades, experiments have revealed that the dynamics in diverse biological systems - from intracellular cytoplasm to cellular and organismal aggregates - are remarkably similar to that…
Physical limit of molecular sensing has been extensively studied in biological systems. Biosensors are engineered equivalents of molecular sensors in living systems and play critical role in disease diagnosis and management. Investigation…