生物物理
We present an extension of the Poisson-Boltzmann model in which the solute of interest is immersed in an assembly of self-orienting Langevin water dipoles, anions, cations, and hydrophobic molecules, all of variable densities. Interactions…
Enzymes have been recently proposed to have mechanical activity associated with their chemical activity. In a number of recent studies, it has been reported that enzymes undergo enhanced diffusion in the presence of their corresponding…
Chemotaxis of enzymes in response to gradients in the concentration of their substrate has been widely reported in recent experiments, but a basic understanding of the process is still lacking. Here, we develop a microscopic theory for…
While it is commonly observed that the shape dynamics of mammalian cells can undergo large random fluctuations, theoretical models aiming at capturing cell mechanics often focus on the deterministic part of the motion. In this paper, we…
Monte Carlo simulations are performed to study structure and dynamics of a protein CoVE in random media generated by a random distribution of barriers at concentration c with a coarse-grained model in its native (low temperature) and…
The synthesis of ATP, life's 'universal energy currency', is the most prevalent chemical reaction in biological systems, and is responsible for fueling nearly all cellular processes, from nerve impulse propagation to DNA synthesis. ATP…
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) may cause severe loss of vision or blindness particularly in elderly people. Exudative AMD is characterized by angiogenesis of blood vessels growing from underneath the macula, crossing the…
The spatial organization of complex biochemical reactions is essential for the regulation of cellular processes. Membrane-less structures called foci containing high concentrations of specific proteins have been reported in a variety of…
The observation of neuron-like behaviour in bacteria, such as the occurrence of electric spiking and extended bioelectric signalling, points to the role of membrane dynamics in prokaryotes. Electrophysiology of bacteria, however, has been…
The space radiation environment is a complex combination of fast-moving ions derived from all atomic species found in the periodic table. The energy spectrum of each ion species varies widely but is prominently in the range of 400 - 600…
Collections of cells exhibit coherent migration during morphogenesis, cancer metastasis, and wound healing. In many cases, bigger clusters split, smaller sub-clusters collide and reassemble, and gaps continually emerge. The connections…
Enzyme-based systems have been shown to undergo directional motion in response to their substrate gradient. Here, we formulate a kinetic model to analyze the directional movement of an ensemble of protein molecules in response to a gradient…
Cholesterol (CHOL) drives lipid segregation and is thus a key player for the formation of lipid rafts and followingly for the ability of a cell to, e.g., enable selective agglomeration of proteins. The lipid segregation is driven by…
Chlorophylls and carotenoids, key components of photosynthetic systems, are proposed for molecular communications at the nanoscale with the mechanism of resonance energy transfer. Both types of pigments are introduced focusing on their…
We review progress in active hydrodynamic descriptions of flowing media on curved and deformable manifolds: the state-of-the-art in continuum descriptions of single-layers of epithelial and/or other tissues during development. First, after…
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-CoronaVirus 2 (SARS-CoV2) caused the ongoing pandemic. This pandemic devastated the world by killing more than a million people, as of October 2020. It is imperative to understand the transmission dynamics…
Determining the different conformational states of a protein and the transition paths between them is key to fully understanding the relationship between biomolecular structure and function. This can be accomplished by sampling protein…
It is known that bipolar disorder and its lithium treatment involve the modulation of oxidative stress. Moreover, it has been observed that lithium's effects are isotope-dependent. Based on these findings, here we propose that lithium…
We describe a viscocapillary instability that can perturb the spherical symmetry of cellular aggregates in culture, also called multicellular spheroids. In the condition where the cells constituting the spheroid get their necessary…
The deformability of red blood cells is an essential parameter that controls the rheology of blood as well as its circulation in the body. Characterizing the rigidity of the cells and their heterogeneity in a blood sample is thus a key…