Related papers: Single-molecule biophysics
We present two examples of how single-molecule experimental techniques applied to biological systems can give insight into problems within the scope of equilibrium and nonequilibrium mesoscopic thermodynamics. The first example is the…
Cancer is a complex disease that is characterized by uncontrolled growth and division of cells. It involves a complex interplay between genetic and environmental factors that lead to the initiation and progression of tumors. Recent advances…
Molecular motors fulfill critical functions within all living beings. Understanding their underlying working principles is therefore of great interest. Here we develop a simple model inspired by the two-component biomolecular motor Fo-F1…
Cell motility is one of the most fundamental phenomena underlying biological processes that maintain living organisms alive. Here we introduce a simple model to describe the motility of cells which include not only time-correlated internal…
Physical arguments and comparisons with published experimental data suggest that in simple liquids: i) single-molecule-scale viscous forces are produced by temperature-dependent London dispersion forces, ii) viscosity decay with increasing…
Biological molecular machines are enzymes that simultaneously catalyze two processes, one donating free energy and second accepting it. Recent studies show that most native protein enzymes have a rich stochastic dynamics that often…
The understanding of the nanoscale physical properties of biomolecules and biomaterials will ultimately promote the research in the biological sciences. In this review, we focused on theory, simulation, and experiments involving nanoscale…
Phase transitions, such as the freezing of water and the magnetisation of a ferromagnet upon lowering the ambient temperature, are familiar physical phenomena. Interestingly, such a collective change of behaviour at a phase transition is…
The macroscopic behaviour of active matter arises from nonequilibrium microscopic processes. In soft materials, active stresses typically drive macroscopic shape changes, which in turn alter the geometry constraining the microscopic…
The incredible thermo-mechanical properties of biological materials arise from the microscopic scale due to a complex hierarchical mechanism, regulated by microinstabilities at the molecular level. The description of such complex structures…
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…
The field of ultracold quantum matter has burgeoned over the last few decades, thanks to the growing capabilities for atomic systems to be probed and manipulated with exquisite control. Researchers can now precisely create and study quantum…
Locomotion and transport of microorganisms in fluids is an essential aspect of life. Search for food, orientation toward light, spreading of off-spring, and the formation of colonies are only possible due to locomotion. Swimming at the…
Stochastic models of reaction-diffusion systems are important for the study of biochemical reaction networks where species are present in low copy numbers or if reactions are highly diffusion limited. In living cells many such systems…
Biological membranes mainly consist of lipids and proteins. While the proteins have many functions as single molecules, the membrane as a whole displays physical properties that cannot be explained on the single molecule level. For example,…
Macromolecules change their shape (conformation) in the process of carrying out their functions. The imaging by cryo-electron microscopy of rapidly-frozen, individual copies of macromolecules (single particles) is a powerful and general…
Active matter agents consume internal energy or extract energy from the environment for locomotion and force generation. Already rather generic models, such as ensembles of active Brownian particles, exhibit phenomena, which are absent at…
In this article, we combine the ideas introduced by us earlier in various proportions to arrive at a simple and yet powerful means of studying single-particle properties of homogeneous Fermi systems in detail without making assumptions…
During overflow metabolism, cells excrete glycolytic byproducts when growing under aerobic conditions in a seemingly wasteful fashion. While potentially advantageous for microbes with finite oxidative capacity, its role in higher organisms…
It is probably not a coincidence that two of the pioneers of thermodynamics, Helmholtz and Mayer, were physicians. Thermodynamics studies the transformations of energy, and such transformations ceaselessly take place in all living systems…