Physics of Living Systems

Physics of Living Systems

eLife reviews research in which approaches from the physical sciences are used to provide insights into the properties of biological systems and processes. Learn more about what we review and sign up for the latest research.
Illustration by Davide Bonazzi

Latest articles

    1. Cell Biology
    2. Physics of Living Systems

    Mitosis sets nuclear homeostasis of cancer cells under confinement

    Malèke Mouelhi, Alexis Saffon ... Charlotte Rivière
    1. Developmental Biology
    2. Physics of Living Systems

    The Geometric Basis of Epithelial Convergent Extension

    Fridtjof Brauns, Nikolas H. Claussen ... Boris I. Shraiman
    1. Physics of Living Systems

    Hydrodynamics and multiscale order in confluent epithelia

    Josep-Maria Armengol-Collado, Livio Nicola Carenza, Luca Giomi
    Confluent cellular layers display the remarkable ability of supportingmultiscale orientational order, that is the existence of different typeof liquid crystal order at different length scales.
    1. Cell Biology
    2. Physics of Living Systems

    Caveolin-1 protects endothelial cells from extensive expansion of transcellular tunnel by stiffening the plasma membrane

    Camille Morel, Eline Lemerle ... Emmanuel Lemichez
    Caveolin-1 controls the width of transendothelial cell tunnels via a direct or indirect effect on membrane bending rigidity.
    1. Microbiology and Infectious Disease
    2. Physics of Living Systems

    Potassium-mediated bacterial chemotactic response

    Chi Zhang, Rongjing Zhang, Junhua Yuan
    1. Physics of Living Systems

    Structural basis for the preservation of a subset of topologically associating domains in interphase chromosomes upon cohesin depletion

    Davin Jeong, Guang Shi ... D Thirumalai
    The finding that deletion of the genome folding motor leaves a significant fraction of a key structural feature of chromosome at the single cell and ensemble level has been explained.
    1. Neuroscience
    2. Physics of Living Systems

    C9orf72 polyPR directly binds to various nuclear transport components

    Hamidreza Jafarinia, Erik van der Giessen, Patrick R Onck
    Length-dependent interference of arginine-containing dipeptide repeat proteins with multiple components of the nucleocytoplasmic transport machinery is a potential mechanistic pathway of C9orf72 amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or frontotemporal dementia toxicity.
    1. Neuroscience
    2. Physics of Living Systems

    Neural criticality from effective latent variables

    Mia C Morrell, Ilya Nemenman, Audrey Sederberg
    Signatures of criticality that have been observed across diverse neural systems, such as power-law avalanche distributions and exponent relationships, can arise without fine-tuning in networks coupled to latent, dynamical variables.
    1. Physics of Living Systems

    A unified approach to dissecting biphasic responses in cell signaling

    Vaidhiswaran Ramesh, J Krishnan
    In-built competing effects are present at different levels in signaling networks, starting from basic biochemical building blocks to the network level, and mathematical and computational analysis reveals when they give rise to biphasic responses and what the consequences are.

Senior editors

  1. Felix Campelo
    The Institute of Photonic Sciences, Spain
  2. Aleksandra Walczak
    Ecole Normale Superieure, France
  3. See more editors