Biophysics articles within Nature Physics

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  • News & Views |

    A class of biological matter including elongated cells and filaments can be understood in the framework of active nematic liquid crystals. Within these systems, topological defects emerge and give rise to remarkable collective behaviours.

    • M.-A. Fardin
    •  & B. Ladoux

  • Letter |

    Topological defects in active nematic systems such as epithelial tissues and neural progenitor cells can be associated with biological functions. Here, the authors show that defects can play a role in the layer formation of the soil bacterium Myxococcus xanthus.

    • Katherine Copenhagen
    • , Ricard Alert
    •  & Joshua W. Shaevitz

  • Letter |

    Bacteria are able to move as vast, dense collectives. Here the authors show that slow movement is key to this collective behaviour because faster bacteria cause topological defects to collide together and trap cells in place.

    • O. J. Meacock
    • , A. Doostmohammadi
    •  & W. M. Durham

  • News & Views |

    Animals seem capable of an infinite variety of movement, yet also exhibit substantial stereotypy in repeated actions. A beautiful view of worm behaviour now shows that the worm’s state evolves deterministically but is bounced chaotically between unstable periodic orbits.

    • Jane Loveless
    •  & Barbara Webb

  • Article |

    Spatiotemporal waves appear during collective cell migration and are affected by mechanical forces and biochemical signalling. Here the authors develop a biophysical model that can quantitatively account for complex mechanochemical patterns, and predict how they can be used for optimal collective migration.

    • Daniel Boocock
    • , Naoya Hino
    •  & Edouard Hannezo

  • Letter |

    Bacteria live in heterogeneous environments, so it is important to investigate their behaviour in porous media. Here the authors show that flow disorder enhances the effect of chemical gradients in micropockets in a porous medium, which then aid the transport of bacteria.

    • Pietro de Anna
    • , Amir A. Pahlavan
    •  & Ruben Juanes

  • Article |

    The unpredictability of evolution makes it difficult to deal with drug resistance because over the course of a treatment there may be mutations that we cannot predict. The authors propose to use quantum methods to control the speed and distribution of potential evolutionary outcomes.

    • Shamreen Iram
    • , Emily Dolson
    •  & Michael Hinczewski

  • Article |

    The authors investigate the relationship between the volume of malignant tumours and their metabolic processes using a large dataset of patients with cancer. They find that cancers follow a superlinear metabolic scaling law, which implies that the proliferation of cancer cells accelerates with increasing volume.

    • Víctor M. Pérez-García
    • , Gabriel F. Calvo
    •  & Ana M. García Vicente

  • News & Views |

    Everybody who has ever made a paper airplane and been disappointed as it spins out of control, crashing to the ground, knows how tricky achieving suitable trim and stability for gliding can be. But, somehow, wiggling flying snakes glide without tumbling.

    • Jim Usherwood

  • Article |

    Observations of flying snakes inform the development of a dynamical model of gliding taking undulation into account. This work suggests that aerial undulation has a different function in snakes than in other animals.

    • Isaac J. Yeaton
    • , Shane D. Ross
    •  & John J. Socha

  • Article |

    The structures of stingers of living organisms are surprisingly similar despite their vastly different lengths. Now, stingers are found to obey a unifying mechanistic principle that characterizes the stingers resistance to buckling.

    • Kaare H. Jensen
    • , Jan Knoblauch
    •  & Keunhwan Park

  • News & Views |

    Microscopic motile cilia, beating in synchrony across large scales, move the liquid lining of our lungs, protecting from infection and dirt. Surprisingly, a disordered arrangement of cilia, as observed in nature, is shown to be optimal for airway clearance.

    • Pietro Cicuta

  • Measure for Measure |

    As a unit for enzyme activity, the katal is enigmatic but struggles to find widespread acceptance. Soumitra Athavale tells its story.

    • Soumitra V. Athavale

  • Article |

    Symmetry breaking is essential for polarization of cells and generation of left–right body asymmetry. Here the authors investigate the arrangement of hair cells in zebrafish and show that mirror-symmetric patterns arise from a combination of biochemical and mechanical symmetry-breaking events.

    • A. Erzberger
    • , A. Jacobo
    •  & A. J. Hudspeth

  • Letter |

    Activity in certain living systems can lead to swirling flows akin to turbulence. Here, the authors connect the dynamics of topological defects in starfish oocyte membranes to vortex dynamics in 2D Bose–Einstein condensates.

    • Tzer Han Tan
    • , Jinghui Liu
    •  & Nikta Fakhri

  • Article |

    Groups of fish tend to move in an organized fashion. Here the authors investigate the behaviour of schools of freshwater fish and find that schooling is induced by noise; the smaller the group size, the greater the noise and hence the greater the alignment.

    • Jitesh Jhawar
    • , Richard G. Morris
    •  & Vishwesha Guttal

  • Letter |

    The motor protein dynein is associated with microtubule force generation in the cell; how it interacts with cytoskeletal fluctuations is still an open question. Here the authors show that dynein can harness these fluctuations to generate power and move faster towards the minus-end of microtubules.

    • Yasin Ezber
    • , Vladislav Belyy
    •  & Ahmet Yildiz

  • Article |

    A detailed theoretical and experimental investigation of homogeneous cell tissues finds that they can undergo spontaneous spatial symmetry breaking through a purely electrophysiological mechanism.

    • Harold M. McNamara
    • , Rajath Salegame
    •  & Adam E. Cohen

  • News & Views |

    Synchronization of biochemical oscillators that are responsible for biological rhythms costs free energy. This theoretical result suggests that part of the adenosine triphosphate molecules consumed by a Kai oscillator is necessary for synchronization.

    • Andre C. Barato

  • News & Views |

    Physical forces have a profound influence on bacterial cell function and physiology. The new tools of nanophysics are bringing to light a tight connection between biomolecular mechanisms and mechanical forces in bacterial cell division.

    • Albertus Viljoen
    •  & Yves F. Dufrêne

  • Review Article |

    Cell size is regulated by processes ranging from rapid fluctuations to slower growth and division. Limited dialogue between communities studying these disparate timescales has hindered our understanding of size control—a gap bridged by this Review.

    • Clotilde Cadart
    • , Larisa Venkova
    •  & Matthieu Piel

  • News & Views |

    Whether a cell divides symmetrically or asymmetrically during early development determines the fate of its progeny. Now cell size has emerged as a key player in making this decision.

    • Alexandra Jilkine

  • Article |

    An observation that cells at the edge of a healing wound readily undergo intercalation leads to the finding that tissue fluidity is crucial for effective wound closure.

    • Robert J. Tetley
    • , Michael F. Staddon
    •  & Yanlan Mao

  • Article |

    The proteins tasked with establishing polarity in a cell undergo reaction–diffusion dynamics that are shown here to impose a cell-size threshold on polarization. The limit may facilitate switching between symmetric and asymmetric modes of division.

    • Lars Hubatsch
    • , Florent Peglion
    •  & Nathan W. Goehring

  • Article |

    Modelling and microscopy of thousands of cells together reveal the coupling through which the cell cycle influences the circadian clock. This coupling may explain why mammalian tissues growing at different rates have shifted circadian rhythms.

    • Colas Droin
    • , Eric R. Paquet
    •  & Felix Naef

  • Article |

    Microtubules vary their length by gaining and shedding tubulin dimers dynamically at both ends. But evidence now suggests that dimers may also be incorporated into the middle of the shaft—calling into question existing models of growth dynamics.

    • Laura Schaedel
    • , Sarah Triclin
    •  & Karin John

  • News & Views |

    An experimental study of living cells suggests that single myosin molecules are capable of generating unusually large forces. The observation is supported by a theoretical model — and demonstrates the complexity of in vivo force generation.

    • Andrew W. Holle
    •  & Ralf Kemkemer

  • Article |

    When a wound heals, different types of branched and bundled actin structure form, each designed to perform a specific function. Experiments and theory now suggest that the actin architecture depends on the stiffness of the cell’s surroundings.

    • Visar Ajeti
    • , A. Pasha Tabatabai
    •  & Michael P. Murrell

  • Article |

    High-resolution experiments attribute surprisingly large forces to the molecular motors helping a cell sense its surroundings. A two-state theory interprets the contractile properties of these motors as emergent features of their collective behaviour.

    • James Lohner
    • , Jean-Francois Rupprecht
    •  & Michael P. Sheetz

  • Letter |

    A continuous version of the Maxwell demon is a machine that repeatedly monitors a system, but extracts work only on state change. Arbitrarily large quantities of work can thus be extracted, as demonstrated by DNA hairpin pulling experiments.

    • M. Ribezzi-Crivellari
    •  & F. Ritort

  • Article |

    Bacteria swimming near surfaces can get trapped in circular trajectories that lead nowhere, hindering efficient surface exploration. A harmful strain of bacteria is now shown to circumvent the problem by exploiting transient surface adhesion events.

    • Emiliano Perez Ipiña
    • , Stefan Otte
    •  & Fernando Peruani

  • Article |

    The same type of polymer network deforms cell membranes inward, to absorb external material, and outward, to facilitate signal transmission. Experiments and theory show that these deformations are regulated by membrane tension and network mesh size.

    • Camille Simon
    • , Rémy Kusters
    •  & Cécile Sykes

  • News & Views |

    A two-state hopping experiment combined with a dynamical systems model reveals that cancer cells are deterministically driven across barriers, whereas normal cells cross only with the help of stochastic fluctuations.

    • Ulrich S. Schwarz

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