The Chemical Biophysics Symposium (CBP) is a student-organized conference, which provides an informal venue for discussions on some of the most intriguing topics at the interface of chemistry, biology, and physics.

Novel methods in biological physics are becoming critical in clinical application, to functionally interpret cancer genomic alterations. For Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL), a heterogeneous disease of B-lymphocytes maturing under constitutive B-cell receptor (BCR) stimulation, the functional role of diverse clonal mutations remains largely unknown. We present here a combination of single-cell measurements and computational modeling to demonstrate that alterations in BCR signaling dynamics underlie the progression of B-cells toward malignancy. We apply nonlinear dynamics methods to reveal emergent dynamic features, namely bimodality, hypersensitivity, and hysteresis, in the BCR signaling pathway of primary CLL B-cells. We demonstrate that such signaling abnormalities in CLL quantitatively derive from BCR clustering and constitutive signaling with positive feedback reinforcement, as demonstrated through single-cell analysis of signaling motifs, computational modeling, and superresolution imaging. Such dysregulated signaling segregates CLL patients by disease severity and clinical presentation. Our findings provide a novel quantitative framework and illustrate how approaches borrowed from biological physics help assess complex and heterogeneous cancer pathology.

Protein translocases, found in all kingdoms of life, facilitate the transport of proteins across biological membranes. How these membrane-embedded translocases recognize and transport their heterogeneous and structurally unwieldy protein substrates across membranes is poorly understood.

In contrast to globular proteins, intrinsically disordered proteins do not form stable, compact structures under physiological conditions. Rather, often their functions are derived from their properties as extended, flexible polymers.

The ear is a remarkable detector: It is both highly sensitive and selective, and operates over a large dynamic range spanning more than 12 orders of magnitude. Not only does it respond to sound, but emits it as well. These sounds, known as otoacoustic emissions (OAEs), provide a means to probe the fundamental biophysics underlying transduction and amplification in the ear. This talk will describe the empirical nature of OAE data, as well as theoretical approaches describing the underlying biomechanics using coupled oscillators. While this modeling focuses on the auditory system, an underlying goal is to identify emergent behavior (e.g., phase coherence) that arises universally in qualitatively similar complex biological systems (e.g., neural networks).

Hidden inside of a single individual living cell there exists a dynamical system of multiple, interrelated, chemical processes. Collectively, it is these dynamics and chemical interrelations that define life.