Levels of Biological Organisation: L1 Subcellular machinery
This operates in a highly crowded environment that is hard to treat theoretically, thereby limiting current understanding of such key functions as transport, growth and division.
Related Research Projects
Research Project: Beyond the extensile/contractile dichotomy in active nematics
Active nematics is one of the most studied situations in active matter physics, both in theory and experiments.
Research Project: Collective tug-of-war dynamics: from molecular motors to ant groups
The emergence of directed transport as a collective behaviour of many microscopic constituents is a ubiquitous problem in the statistical physics of active particles.
Research Project: Dynamics of interacting molecular motors
The dynamics of the sperm flagellum has been recently studied with particular attention to its fluctuations. It has been found that the precision of the flagellar beating is close to that of an individual dynein motor powering its motion, which in turn is close to the bound dictated by the thermodynamic uncertainty relation.
Research Project: Elucidating the role of mechano-signalling feedback in dense cellular collectives
Collective tissue behaviour is inherently a multiscale phenomenon that is governed by complex biochemical and mechanical processes occurring simultaneously at the molecular, cellular, and tissue scales.
Research Project: Exploring (dry) active field theories (AMB+) to unravel solidification of protein condensates
The spatial organisation of proteins into dense condensates, widely attributed to nonequilibrium phase separation, offers a route to recruit or sequester proteins involved in functions at the cellular level.