Browse our latest Physics of Living Systems articles

A tracking animal's decision to intermittently pause and sniff the air reflects its belief that it is far downwind of the odor source, where benefits of sensing rare airborne cues outweigh the cost of pausing.

Computational model reveals why pausing to sniff the air helps animals track a scent when they are far away from the source.

Computational evolutionary model to predict the efficacy of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) in suppressing HIV and to design optimal combination therapy with bNAbs.

Tracking proteins in live cells is challenging due to technical limitations and biological complexity, but approaches based in Bayesian nonparametrics stand a decent chance at recovering a target protein's dynamic profile from noisy data.

The emergent organization of bacterial proteomes—the integration of proteins into collective networks that encode function—can be defined purely from spectral analysis of ortholog covariation across extant diversity.

The volume of the nucleus is dictated by a balance of colloid osmotic forces from the nucleoplasm and cytoplasm.

A biophysical model in which kinetochore microtubules nucleate at kinetochores and growth polward along nematic streamlines quantitatively explains kinetochore microtubule lengths, orientations, and spatially varying dynamics in metaphase human spindles.

A phase shift between local contractions drives 3D cell motility in experiments and in model or how a finite area in the dipole-quadrupole space explains cell motion with zero total force.

The speed of replisomes in Escherichia coli depends on temperature and varies along the genome in a wave-like manner, with implications for bacterial physiology.

Intensity of an odor and timing of its detection are complementary attributes of turbulent plumes and enable robust prediction of the location of a distant target.