生物物理
Protein identification and profiling is critical for the advancement of cell and molecular biology as well as medical diagnostics. Although mass spectrometry and protein microarrays are commonly used for protein identification, both methods…
In allosteric proteins, binding a ligand can affect function at a distant location, for example by changing the binding affinity of a substrate at the active site. The induced fit and population shift models, which differ by the assumed…
The development of traction-force microscopy, in the past two decades, has created the unprecedented opportunity of performing direct mechanical measurements on living cells as they adhere or crawl on uniform or micro-patterned substrates.…
A swarm of preys when attacked by a predator is known to rely on their cooperative interactions to escape. Understanding such interactions of collectively moving preys and the emerging patterns of their escape trajectories still remain…
Understanding cellular response to mechanical forces is immensely important for a plethora of biological processes. Focal adhesions are multi-molecular protein assemblies that connect the cell to the extracellular matrix and play a pivotal…
Some of the key proteins essential for important cellular processes are capable of recruiting other proteins from the cytosol to phospholipid membranes. The physical basis for this cooperativity of binding is, surprisingly, still unclear.…
Cellular self-assembly and organization are fundamental steps for the development of biological tissues. In this paper, within the framework of a cellular automata model, we address how an ordered tissue pattern spontaneously emerges from a…
An interfacial regularized Stokeslet scheme is presented to predict the motion of solid bodies (e.g. proteins or gel-phase domains) embedded within flowing lipid bilayer membranes. The approach provides a numerical route to calculate…
The room temperature pump-probe X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) measurements used for serial femtosecond crystallography provide remarkable information about the structures of the catalytic (S-state) intermediates of the oxygen-evolution…
Gene regulation is one of the most important fundamental biological processes in living cells. It involves multiple protein molecules that locate specific sites on DNA and assemble gene initiation or gene repression multi-molecular…
Genetic and environmental factors are traditionally seen as the sole causes of congenital anomalies. In this paper we introduce a third possible cause, namely random "manufacturing" discrepancies with respect to ``design'' values. A clear…
The light-harvesting efficiency of a photoactive molecular complex is largely determined by the properties of its electronic quantum states. Those, in turn, are influenced by molecular vibrational states of the nuclear degrees of freedom.…
Here we present a novel method for the analysis of transport processes in proteins and its implementation called CaverDock. Our method is based on a modified molecular docking algorithm. It iteratively places the ligand along the access…
Lipid vesicles play a key role in fundamental biological processes. Despite recent progress, we lack a complete understanding of the non-equilibrium dynamics of vesicles due to challenges associated with long-time observation of shape…
We present a laser scanning reflection-matrix microscopy combining the scanning of laser focus and the wide-field mapping of the electric field of the backscattered waves for eliminating higher-order aberrations even in the presence of…
The diffusion of a particle in a crowded environment typically proceeds through three regimes: for very short times the particle diffuses freely until it collides with an obstacle for the first time, while for very long times diffusion the…
Designing strong and robust bio-inspired structures requires an understanding of how function arises from the architecture and geometry of materials found in nature. We draw from trabecular bone, a lightweight bone tissue that exhibits a…
An ancient repertoire of UV absorbing pigments which survive today in the phylogenetically oldest extant photosynthetic organisms the cyanobacteria point to a direction in evolutionary adaptation of the pigments and their associated biota…
Collective cell migration is a key driver of embryonic development, wound healing, and some types of cancer invasion. Here we provide a physical perspective of the mechanisms underlying collective cell migration. We begin with a catalogue…
We perform an analytical investigation of the cell interface dynamics in the framework of a minimal phase field model of cell motility suggested in [1], which consists of two coupled evolution equations for the order parameter and a…