Increasingly accurate and massive data have recently shed light on the fundamental question of how cells maintain a stable size trajectory as they progress through the cell cycle. Microbes seem to use strategies ranging from a pure sizer, where the end of a given phase is triggered when the cell reaches a critical size, to pure adder, where the cell adds a constant size during a phase. Yet the ...

Minhaj Sirajuddin talks to Francesca Lake, Head of Open Access Publishing. Minhaj Sirajuddin is currently an Assistant Investigator at the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine (InStem), Bangalore, India. His lab works on understanding biological motility mediated by cytoskeleton elements using biophysics and cell biology. Previously his tenures were at UCSF (CA, USA) for hi...

Jordan Raff is a Cancer Research UK funded group leader at the Wellcome/CR-UK Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, England. He obtained his PhD from the Department of Biochemistry at Imperial College, London, and he worked as a Post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Biophysics and Biochemistry, University of California, San Francisco. He is currently a Director of the Company of Biologists, and on...

Motivated by diverse phenomena in cellular biophysics, including bacterial flagellar motion and DNA transcription and replication, we study the overdamped nonlinear dynamics of a rotationally forced filament with twist and bend elasticity. Competition between twist injection, twist diffusion, and writhing instabilities is described by coupled PDEs for twist and bend evolution. Analytical and nu...

In the years followingWorldWar II therewas an explosion in the biological scienceswith the rapid emergence of cell biology, molecular biology and biophysics. These events were affectedby the development anduse of new technologies for cellular fractionation and imaging, specifically the electronmicroscope, which provided a resolution, that is, unobtainable with light microscopes. Electron micros...

Amandeep K. Sangha, Loukas Petridis, Jeremy C. Smith, Angela Ziebell, and Jerry M. Parks a UT/ORNL Center for Molecular Biophysics, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6309; [email protected] (for correspondence) b BioEnergy Science Center, Oak Ridge, TN c Department of Biochemistry and Cellular and Molecular Biology, University of Tennessee, M407 Walters Life Sciences, 1414 Cumbe...

A common trafficking route for GLUT4 in cardiomyocytes in response to insulin, contraction and energy-status signalling Daniel J. Fazakerley1, Scott P. Lawrence1, Vladimir A. Lizunov2, Samuel W. Cushman3 and Geoffrey D. Holman1,* 1Department of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath BA2 7AY, UK 2Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Biophysics, Program on Physical Bio...

Cells acquire their fate in vivo in the context of a complex microenvironmental "niche" comprised of heterologous cell types, signaling molecules, extracellular matrix, biophysical forces, and metabolic substrates. Now Calderón and Boehm report the "refunctionalization" of a defective thymic epithelial niche, offering insights into how signaling molecules may be hierarchically organized to dire...

The copy number of any protein fluctuates among cells in a population; characterizing and understanding these fluctuations is a fundamental problem in biophysics. We show here that protein distributions measured under a broad range of biological realizations collapse to a single non-gaussian curve under scaling by the first two moments. Moreover, in all experiments the variance is found to depe...

Division of Cardiology, Dept of Medicine, Medical University of South Carolina, and RHJ Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Charleston, SC; Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Dept of Surgery, Medical University of South Carolina, and RHJ Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Charleston, SC; Dept of Public Health Sciences, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC...