生物物理
Probing the reaction mechanisms of supramolecular processes in soft- and biological matter, such as protein aggregation, is inherently challenging. These processes emerge from the simultaneous action of multiple molecular mechanisms, each…
Biofilms are communities of bacteria adhered to surfaces. Recently, biofilms of rod-shaped bacteria were observed at single-cell resolution and shown to develop from a disordered, two-dimensional layer of founder cells into a…
Mammalian ultrasonic vocalization (USV) has been a subject of interest for decades. This interest has mainly been driven by the intelligence of dolphins and other odontocetes. However the semantic content of odontocete USV and its mechanism…
Selectivity filter is a gate in ion channels which are responsible for the selection and fast conduction of particular ions across the membrane (with high throughput rates of $10^8$ ions/sec and a high 1:$10^4$ discrimination rate between…
Medium and large insects in normal hovering have horizontal, planar up- and downstrokes1-4. The lift of the two half-strokes, generated by the leading-edge vortex, provides the weight-supporting vertical force. But for small insects (wing…
Protein structure reconstruction from Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) experiments largely relies on computational algorithms. Recently, some effective low-rank matrix completion (MC) methods, such as ASD and ScaledASD, have been…
The mechanism responsible for the compaction of the genomic DNA of bacteria inside a structure called the nucleoid is a longstanding but still lively debated question. Most puzzling is the fact that the nucleoid occupies only a small…
Diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging in brain white matter probes tissue microstructure and allows for the estimation of compartmental diffusion parameters. Recently, it became apparent that traditional single-direction diffusion…
The burnt-bridges ratchet (BBR) mechanism is a model for biased molecular motion whereby the construct destroys track binding sites as it progresses, and therefore acts as a diffusing forager, seeking new substrate sites. Using Monte Carlo…
Emergence and maintenance of polymers with complex sequences is a major question in the study of origins of life. To answer this, we studied a model polymerization reaction, where polymers are synthesized by stepwise ligation from two types…
Learning Ising or Potts models from data has become an important topic in statistical physics and computational biology, with applications to predictions of structural contacts in proteins and other areas of biological data analysis. The…
Receptor-mediated endocytosis is an ubiquitous process through which cells internalize biological or synthetic nanoscale objects, including viruses, unicellular parasites, and nanomedical vectors for drug or gene delivery. In passive…
Metastatic tumors often invade healthy neighboring tissues by forming multicellular finger-like protrusions emerging from the cancer mass. To understand the mechanical context behind this phenomenon, we here develop a minimalist fluid model…
It is suggested that there is an interesting transition in double helices. The transition is between a helix, which has maximal torsion for the constituting helical strands, and a double helix which is nearly optimally packed illustrated by…
Flying birds navigate effectively through crosswinds, even when wind speeds are as high as flight speeds. What information birds use to sense crosswinds and compensate is largely unknown. We found that lovebirds can navigate 45-degree…
Large parallel gains in the development of both computational resources as well as sampling methods have now made it possible to simulate dissociation events in ligand-protein complexes with all--atom resolution. Such encouraging progress,…
The circadian oscillator exhibits remarkably high temporal precision, despite its exposure to several fluctuations. The central mechanism that protects the oscillator from fluctuations is a collective enhancement of precision, where a…
The Poisson-Nernst-Planck (PNP) system is a standard model for describing ion transport. In many applications, e.g., ions in biological tissues, the presence of thin boundary layers poses both modelling and computational challenges. In this…
Liquid cellular compartments spatially segregate from the cytoplasm and can regulate aberrant protein aggregation, a process linked to several medical conditions, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. Yet the mechanisms by which…
Imaging neuronal activity non-invasively in vivo is of tremendous interest, but current imaging techniques lack either functional contrast or necessary microscopic resolution. The retina is the only part of the central nervous system (CNS)…