生物物理
Light harvesting 2 (LH2) complex is a primary component of the photosynthetic unit of purple bacteria that is responsible for harvesting and relaying excitons. The electronic absorption line shape of LH2 contains two major bands at 800 nm…
Imagine you walk in a plane. You move by making a step of a certain length per time interval in a chosen direction. Repeating this process by randomly sampling step length and turning angle defines a two-dimensional random walk in what we…
Seed dispersal is a fundamental process that allows offspring to reach suitable habitats and colonize new environments. While most plants rely on external vectors, some have evolved mechanisms that employ the buildup of liquid pressure in a…
Accessing the properties of a plant cell interior non-invasively is difficult due to the presence of a cell wall. Nanoparticles larger than 5 nm cannot be readily phagocytosed inside the cell like animal cells. It is here that we realise…
As small particles skim our airways during breathing, or our intestines during digestion, the surface epithelium is subjected to local exogenous shear that deforms hundreds to thousands of tightly interacting cells. Unlike shear…
Neural circuits exhibit structured connectivity, including an overrepresentation of reciprocal connections between neuron pairs. Despite important advances, a full understanding of how such partial symmetry in connectivity shapes neural…
The mechanical properties of actin filaments are essential to their biological functions. Here, we introduce a highly coarse-grained model of actin filaments that preserves helicity and chirality while enabling mesoscale simulations. The…
Explaining how competing species coexist remains a central question in ecology. The well-known competitive exclusion principle (CEP) states that two species competing for the same resource cannot stably coexist, and more generally, that the…
The application of surface plasmon resonance (SPR) has transformed the field of study of interactions between a ligand immobilized on the surface of a sensor chip, designated as $L_S$, and an analyte in solution, referred to as $A$. This…
In many biological networks the responses of individual elements are ambiguous. We consider a scenario in which many sensors respond to a shared signal, each with limited information capacity, and ask that the outputs together convey as…
Viruses display striking diversity in structure, transmission mode, immune interaction, and evolutionary behavior. Despite this diversity, viral strategies are not unconstrained. Here we present a unifying framework that treats viral…
We propose a new analytical potential function to model proton transfer in the adenine-thymine base pair and develop a non-adiabatic quantum mechanical framework to calculate genetic mutation probabilities. This potential has been used to…
The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…
Evolution has shaped animal bodies, yet to what extent biomechanical systems impose constraints and provide opportunities across different behaviors remains unclear. In birds, quiet breathing operates at a resonance of the respiratory…
Soft surfaces, spanning vastly different environmental and biomedical settings, are frequently colonised by surface-associated bacteria. Yet, how soft surfaces govern bacterial dynamics and their self-organisation into colonies remains…
As the cover of embryos and adult organisms, epithelial tissues are subjected to substantial mechanical forces in tissue morphogenesis. However, the finite deformation behaviors of epithelial tissues remain largely unexplored. This study…
Orb-weaving spiders primarily sense leg vibrations to detect and locate prey caught on their wheel-shaped webs. Biological experiments and computational modeling elucidated the physics of how these spiders use long-timescale web-building…
In many developmental systems, cells differentiate into a tissue by reading out morphogen concentration fields, a process fundamentally limited by noise. How much can the precision of this process be improved by nonlocal information, e.g.,…
Recent work has shown an increasing interest in understanding the structure of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and how ribosomes are displayed on it. Here we present a model that explains a physical reason for why the cell creates different…
Accurate EMG-driven musculoskeletal (MSK) modeling is critical for biomechanics, rehabilitation, and assistive technology. However, most models calibrate parameters under a single load, ignoring the fact that tasks with similar kinematics…