Subsections
[Cr:4, Lc:3, Tt:1, Lb:0]
- Review of essential physical principles and laws, forces, energy, laws
of thermodynamics; Life and its physical basis.
- The cell and its components: membranes, cytoskeleton, organelles. The
central role of macromolecules: proteins, nucleic acid, carbohydrates.
Brownian motion and viscosity and their influence on particle motion
in the cell.
- Cell movement, movements of proteins, cytoskeleton, molecular motors,
actin, myosin, active and passive transport, adhesion, cell
signalling, Brownian motion, viscosity, physics at low Reynolds
number.
- The Cell Membrane: lipid bilayers, Liposomes.
- Structure and function of proteins, structural organization within
proteins: primary, secondary, tertiary, and quartenary levels of
organization, stability of proteins, protein folding problem, free
energy and denaturation, motions within proteins, how enzymes work,
measurement of binding and thermodynamic analysis.
- Nucleic acids and genetic information, DNA double helix, How structure
stores information, DNA replication process, From DNA to RNA to
protein, DNA packing, DNA denaturation, unzipping, RNA transcription.
- Neurons, action potential, Hodgkin-Huxley analysis, ion channels and
pumps, biophysics of the synapse, Neural networks.
- Fluorescent imaging techniques, electron microscopy, x-ray
crystallography, NMR spectroscopy, atomic force microscopy, optical
tweezers.
- R. Phillips, J. Kondev and J. Theriot, Physical biology of the
cell, Taylor & Francis (2008).
- M. Daune, Molecular biophysics structures in motion, Oxford
University Press (1999).
