BiophysTO Lunchtime Talks Past Events /
01
- 03
May
2020
Chemical Biophysics Symposium
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.
06
Apr
2017
TBA
23
Mar
2017
TBA
09
Mar
2017
Probing the biophysical regulation of the de novo tumor microenvironment
23
Feb
2017
How Bacterial Toxins Deliver Proteins Across Membranes and into Cells
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.
09
Feb
2017
Single-cell modeling of the dysfunctional signaling in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia
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.
26
Jan
2017
TBA
12
Jan
2017
TBA
08
Dec
2016
TBA
01
Dec
2016
Physics of Tissue Morphogenesis: from cellular forces to tissue shape
17
Nov
2016
Studies on structure, function and interactions of the heat shock protein Hsp40
03
Nov
2016
How bacterial gene silencing proteins contribute to the evolution of pathogens
20
Oct
2016
TBA
06
Oct
2016
Protein-lipid complexes in the lysosome
22
Sep
2016
TBA
08
Sep
2016
Reprogramming membrane protein function by design
21
Apr
2016
The design and application of genetically encoded Apollo-NADP+ sensors to image cellular metabolism in tissues
07
Apr
2016
Chromatin Remodeling Machines
24
Mar
2016
How viruses cross the gate much traveled: Transport of viruses into the cell nucleus
10
Mar
2016
Order from disorder - defining structure in disordered proteins
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.
25
Feb
2016
How Does an Enzyme Unknot DNA? Statistical Mechanics of Disentangling by Topoisomerases
11
Feb
2016
New Initiatives in Combinatorial Microscopies: From Single Molecules to Developmental Events
28
Jan
2016
The Active Ear
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).
14
Jan
2016
Hearing the shape of life: mathematical explorations of cell biology.
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.
17
Dec
2015
Formation of an amyloid state by a bacterial protein: structure and consequences