Related papers: Single-molecule biophysics
We review recent advances in the design, synthesis, and modeling of active fluids. Active fluids have been at the center of many technological innovations and theoretical advances over the past two decades. Research on this new class of…
Energy-based modelling brings engineering insight to the understanding of biomolecular systems. It is shown how well-established control engineering concepts, such as loop-gain, arise from energy feedback loops and are therefore amenable to…
Understanding the mechanisms of interactions within cells, tissues, and organisms is crucial to driving developments across biology and medicine. Mathematical modeling is an essential tool for simulating biological systems and revealing…
We propose a general multiscale approach for the mechanical behavior of three-dimensional networks of macromolecules undergoing strain-induced unfolding. Starting from a (statistically based) energetic analysis of the macromolecule…
Cellular signaling is essential in information processing and decision making. Therefore, a variety of experimental approaches have been developed to study signaling on bulk and single-cell level. Single-cell measurements of signaling…
Human-created engines and evolutionarily optimized molecular motors exhibit sophisticated design in order to harvest chemical or thermal energy for generating unidirectional motion. The complexity of these motors makes their random…
The physiological tradition of biological research analyzes biological systems using reduced descriptions much as an engineer uses a 'black box' description of an amplifier. Simple models have been used by physiologists for a very long…
Collective motion of self-propelled organisms or synthetic particles often termed active fluid has attracted enormous attention in broad scientific community because of it fundamentally non-equilibrium nature. Energy input and interactions…
Quantum-mechanical analysis based on an exact sum rule is used to extract an semiclassical angle-dependent energy function for transition metal ions in biomolecules. The angular dependence is simple but different from existing classical…
In the last decade, the atomically focused beam of a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) was shown to induce a broad set of transformations of material structure, open pathways for probing atomic-scale reactions and…
There is current interest in developing photoactive materials that deform on illumination and can thus be used for photomechanical actuation. This is attractive since it can be affected at a distance, different frequencies can be used to…
The dynamics of biological polymers, including proteins, RNA, and DNA, occur in very high-dimensional spaces. Many naturally-occurring polymers can navigate a vast phase space and rapidly find their lowest free energy (folded) state. Thus,…
The molecular machinery of life is largely created via self-organisation of individual molecules into functional assemblies. Minimal coarse-grained models, where a whole macromolecule is represented by a small number of particles, can be of…
Biomolecular condensates are small droplets forming spontaneously in biological cells via phase separation. They play a role in many cellular processes, but it is unclear how cells control them. Cellular regulation often relies on…
The electrophysiology of betacells is at the origin of insulin secretion. Betacells exhibit a complex behaviour upon stimulation with glucose including repeated and uninterrupted bursting. Mathematical modelling is most suitable to improve…
Autocatalytic reaction system with a small number of molecules is studied numerically by stochastic particle simulations. A novel state due to fluctuation and discreteness in molecular numbers is found, characterized as extinction of…
The fundamental insight into Brownian motion by Einstein is that all substances exhibit continual fluctuations due to thermal agitation balancing with the frictional resistance. However, even at thermal equilibrium, biological activity can…
The ability of many living systems to actively self-propel underlies critical biomedical, environmental, and industrial processes. While such active transport is well-studied in uniform settings, environmental complexities such as geometric…
From a purely operational standpoint, the existence of microbes that can grow under extreme conditions, or "extremophiles", leads to the question of how the molecules making up these microbes can maintain both their structure and function.…
This paper explores the idea that information is an essential and distinctive feature of living systems. Unlike non-living systems, living systems actively acquire, process, and use information about their environments to respond to…