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The implications of large-scale coherence in biological systems and possible links to quantum theory are only beginning to be explored. Whether quantum-like coherent phenomena are relevant, or even possible at all, at the high temperatures…
Cellular systems are observed everywhere in nature, from crystal domains in metals, soap froth and cucumber cells to the network of cosmological voids. Surprisingly, despite their disparate scale and origin all cellular systems follow…
How are granular details of stochastic growth and division of individual cells reflected in smooth deterministic growth of population numbers? We provide an integrated, multiscale perspective of microbial growth dynamics by formulating a…
Self-sustained turbulent structures have been observed in a wide range of living fluids, yet no quantitative theory exists to explain their properties. We report experiments on active turbulence in highly concentrated 3D suspensions of…
Mechanical stresses stemming from environmental factors are a key determinant of cellular behavior and physiology. Yet, the role of self-induced biomechanical stresses in growing bacterial colonies has remained largely unexplored. Here, we…
The prevalence of multicellular organisms is due in part to their ability to form complex structures. How cells pack in these structures is a fundamental biophysical issue, underlying their functional properties. However, much remains…
A dynamic model for cell differentiation is studied, where cells with internal chemical reaction dynamics interact with each other and replicate. It leads to spontaneous differentiation of cells and determination, as is discussed in the…
Culturing cells confined in microscale geometries has been reported in many studies this last decade, in particular following the development of microfluidic-based applications and lab-on-a-chip devices. Such studies usually examine growth…
Organisms show a remarkable range of sizes, yet the dimensions of a single cell rarely exceed $100$ $\mu$m. While the physical and biological origins of this constraint remain poorly understood, exceptions to this rule give valuable…
A hallmark of bacterial populations cultured in vitro is their homogeneity of growth, where the majority of cells display identical growth rate, cell size and content. Recent insights, however, have revealed that even cells growing in…
In a probabilistic cellular automaton in which all local transitions have positive probability, the problem of keeping a bit of information indefinitely is nontrivial, even in an infinite automaton. Still, there is a solution in 2…
Gene regulatory dynamics is governed by molecular processes and therefore exhibits an inherent stochasticity. However, for the survival of an organism it is a strict necessity that this intrinsic noise does not prevent robust functioning of…
Multicellular organisms comprise a diverse collection of stable tissues built from different cell types. It remains unclear how large numbers of interacting cells can precisely coordinate their gene expression during tissue…
The unconstrained genomic DNA of bacteria forms a coil, which volume exceeds 1000 times the volume of the cell. Since prokaryotes lack a membrane-bound nucleus, in sharp contrast with eukaryotes, the DNA may consequently be expected to…
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…
We study the steady state of an assembly of microtubules in a confined volume, analogous to the situation inside a cell where the cell boundary forms a natural barrier to growth. We show that the dynamical equations for growing and…
Accurately determining and classifying the structure of complex networks is the focus of much current research. One class of network of particular interest are metabolic pathways, which have previously been studied from a graph theoretical…
Cell colonies of bacteria, tumour cells and fungi, under nutrient limited growth conditions, exhibit complex branched growth patterns. In order to investigate this phenomenon we present a simple hybrid cellular automaton model of cell…
In principle the geometry of the universe can be investigated by measuring the angular size of known objects as a function of distance. Thus the distribution of angular sizes provides a critical test of the stable and static model of the…
At least one neutrino has a mass of about 50 meV or larger. However, the absolute mass scale for the neutrino remains unknown. Studies of double beta decay offer hope for determining the absolute mass scale. Furthermore, the critical…