生物物理
In this paper we report, clarify and broaden various recent efforts to complement the chemistry-centered models of force generation in muscles by mechanics-centered models. The physical mechanisms of interest can be grouped into two…
Morphogen profiles allow cells to determine their position within a developing organism, but the mechanisms behind the formation of these profiles are still not well agreed upon. Here we derive fundamental limits to the precision of…
Switching of the direction of flagella rotations is the key control mechanism governing the chemotactic activity of E. coli and many other bacteria. Power-law distributions of switching times are most peculiar because their emergence cannot…
In an ongoing debate on the physical nature of the action potential, one group adheres to the electrical model of Hodgkin and Huxley, while the other describes the action potential as a non-linear acoustic pulse propagating within an…
A two-dimensional (2D) model is developed to describe the growth of spotty patterns (domains) in the lipid membranes which result from the coagulation of ion channels. It is assumed that the ion channels can coagulate when activated, e.g.…
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 a…
The manual evaluation, classification and counting of biological objects demands for an enormous expenditure of time and subjective human input may be a source of error. Investigating the shape of red blood cells (RBCs) in microcapillary…
Single-molecule based 3rd generation DNA sequencing technologies have been explored with tremendous effort, among which nanopore sequencing is considered as one of the most promising to achieve the goal of $1,000 genome project towards…
Active stresses can cause instabilities in contractile gels and living tissues. Here we describe a generic hydrodynamic theory that treats these systems as a mixture of two phases of varying activity and different mechanical properties. We…
How cells with diverse morphologies and cytoskeletal architectures modulate their mechanical behaviors to drive robust collective motion within tissues is poorly understood. During wound repair within epithelial monolayers in vitro, cells…
Tumor growth, which plays a central role in cancer evolution, depends on both the internal features of the cells, such as their ability for unlimited duplication, and the external conditions, e.g., supply of nutrients, as well as the…
Plants have developed different tropisms: in particular, they re-orient the growth of their branches towards light (phototropism) or upwards (gravitropism). How these tropisms affect the shape of a tree crown remains unanswered. We address…
Response time and transcription level are vital parameters of gene regulation. They depend on how fast transcription factors (TFs) find and how efficient they occupy their specific target sites. It is well known that target site search is…
Most microorganisms use hair-like cilia with asymmetric beating to perform vital bio-physical processes. In this paper, we demonstrate a novel fabrication method for creating magnetic artificial cilia capable of such biologically inspired…
Angiogenesis - the growth of new blood vessels from a pre-existing vasculature - is key in both physiological processes and on several pathological scenarios such as cancer progression or diabetic retinopathy. For the new vascular networks…
We review the standard lock and key (LK) model for binding small ligands to larger adsorbent molecule. We discuss three levels of the traditional LK model for binding. Within this model the binding constant or the Gibbs energy of the…
To see color, the human visual system combines the response of three types of cone cells in the retina--a compressive process that discards a significant amount of spectral information. Here, we present an approach to enhance human color…
Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy (FCS) is widely used to detect and quantify diffusion processes at the molecular level. The molecules of which diffusion is studied are marked with fluorescent dyes. It is commonly maintained that this…
Bacteria are perhaps the simplest living systems capable of complex behaviour involving sensing and coherent, collective behaviour an example of which is the phenomena of swarming on agar surfaces. Two fundamental questions in bacterial…
Biological functions rely on ordered structures and intricately controlled collective dynamics. In contrast to systems in thermodynamic equilibrium, order is typically established and sustained in stationary states by continuous dissipation…