Browse our latest Physics of Living Systems articles

Experimental manipulations and a mechanical model of the fiber reveal that the Reissner fiber is under heterogenous tension in vivo, and interacts with the motile cilia of diverse cells contacting the cerebrospinal fluid.

Habituation to mechanical vibration of crawling Drosophila larvae exhibits distinct time constants that characterize desensitization, re-sensitization, and further adaptation to repeated stimulus patterns.

Cell stretch release generates plasma membrane (PM) evaginations of ≈100 nm, triggering a local event of actin polymerization that flattens and recovers PM shape.

Combining micropatterning, traction force microscopy, and optogenetics, it is shown that epithelial cells actively respond to mechanical signals from neighboring cells.

To study odor-guided navigation of small animals such as worms and fly larvae, a novel flow chamber and odor sensor array are presented that better characterize the odors that the animal experiences.

A colloid fractal cluster model provides a quantitative link between the atomistic features of an intrinsically disordered polypeptide and the spatial organization of the biomolecular condensate it forms.

Drosophila larvae manipulated by an automated system can be observed for 30+ hr, and new analysis methods of long-timescale trajectories reveal behavioral features previously inaccessible, such as a bimodal distribution of thermal navigation efficiency in individual animals.

Spontaneous contractions allow shedding of the fluid boundary layer and thereby stabilize microbiota.

A multiplexed microfluidic device was developed to facilitate high-throughput screening of bacterial chemotaxis on a single chip and demonstrated across a range of microbes, chemostimulants, and chemical gradient conditions.

Zebrafish have a physiological time-window of 1 hr for breaking left-right symmetry and are highly sensitive to the left-right organizer anterior fluid mechanics rather than to the nature of its fluid content.