生物物理
An important tool in the investigation of the early stages of neurodegenerative disease is the study of dissected living tissue from the brain of an animal model. Such investigations allow the physical structure of individual neurons and…
The problem of characterizing the structure of an elastic network constrained to lie on a frozen curved surface appears in many areas of science and has been addressed by many different approaches, most notably, extending linear elasticity…
Nucleosomes are the fundamental building blocks of chromatin that not only help in the folding of chromatin but also in carrying epigenetic information. It is known that nucleosome sliding is responsible for dynamically organizing chromatin…
The ability to perform noninvasive, non-contact measurements of electric signals produced by action potentials is essential in biomedicine. A key method to do this is to remotely sense signals by the magnetic field they induce. Existing…
Gene expression consists in the synthesis of proteins from the information encoded on DNA. One of the two main steps of gene expression is the translation of messenger RNA (mRNA) into polypeptide sequences of amino acids. Here, by taking…
Although there are theoretical studies on the thermodynamics of ion channels, an investigation involving the thermodynamics of coupled channels has not been proposed. To overcome this issue, we developed calculations to present a…
Despite their widespread use in cell biology, fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) data-sets are challenging to analyse, because each spatial position can contain a superposition of multiple fluorescent components. Here, we…
Phycobilisomes (PBS) are massive structures that absorb and transfer light energy to photochemical reaction centers. Among the range of light harvesting systems, PBS are considered to be excellent solutions for absorption cross-sections but…
Many animals display sensitivity to external magnetic field, but only in the simplest organisms the sensing mechanism is understood. Here we report on behavioural experiments where American cockroaches (Periplaneta americana) were subjected…
The repeating arrangement of tubulin dimers confers great mechanical strength to microtubules, which are used as scaffolds for intracellular macromolecular transport in cells and exploited in biohybrid devices. The crystalline order in a…
The actin cortex of an animal cell is a thin polymeric layer attached to the inner side of the plasma membrane. It plays a key role in shape regulation and pattern formation on the cellular and tissue scale and, in particular, generates the…
The oral route is the most common choice for drug administration because of convenience, low cost, and high patient compliance, but is also a complex route. The rate of dissolution and gastric emptying of the dissolved active pharmaceutical…
Microtubules are hollow cylindrical polymers composed of the highly negatively-charged (~23e), high dipole moment (1750 D) protein a,b-tubulin. While the roles of microtubules in chromosomal segregation, macromolecular transport and cell…
Self-organized pattern formation is vital for many biological processes. Reaction-diffusion models have advanced our understanding of how biological systems develop spatial structures, starting from homogeneity. However, biological…
Cowpea chlorotic mottle virus (CCMV) is a widely used model for virus replication studies. A major challenge lies in distinguishing between the roles of the interaction between coat proteins and that between the coat proteins and the viral…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
Small-angle X-ray or neutron scattering (SAXS/SANS/SAS) is widely used to obtain structural information on biomolecules or soft-matter complexes in solution. Deriving a molecular interpretation of the scattering signals requires methods for…
Understanding the inherent timescales of large bubbles in DNA is critical to a thorough comprehension of its physicochemical characteristics, as well as their potential role on helix opening and biological function. In this work we employ…
Inverse design of short single-stranded RNA and DNA sequences (aptamers) is the task of finding sequences that satisfy a set of desired criteria. Relevant criteria may be, for example, the presence of specific folding motifs, binding to…
Cholesterol (CHOL) is one of the most important components of plasma membranes of higher cells and one of the main factors for the formation of (nano)domains. In this work, molecular dynamics simulations of mixtures of CHOL with DPPC…