#Biophysics

[reionized]

people who work/study in quantitative bio-adjacent fields, rise up. computational neuroscience where you get to see someone's thoughts in feelings in graph form??? so cool. biophysics where you can pass blood plasma through an electric field to determine whether a patient has cancer or not?? unbelievable. biomedical engineering where you can literally build a device to pump someone's heart and be the difference between their life and death??? oh my god. disease modelling, being able to predict AND prevent communities being affected by disease on a large scale through your analysis of data??? i love science

[theoptia]

Franklin, Rosalind Elsie and Gosling, Raymond George. Photo 51. 1952, King´s College London in London, England

The genetic material glimpsed in Photo 51 connects all living things and the image thus metaphorically captures human past, present, and future. It also marks an important milestone in science. In the last half-century, research that drew from Franklin’s photograph has brought advances in biology, medicine, paleontology, and many other parts of life.

[ultimatepad]

Green Building, Shiraz, Iran,

Courtesy: Taybe Kazmi

[miss-biophys]

Work on a scientific article

What it actuallly entails:

Come up with an idea, define an interesting problem

Do thorough literature research. Maybe similar stuff was already done. Define the knowledge gap well.

Plan in detail, how we can solve the problem, design experiments

Reach out to potential collaborators, agree with them on a plan

Buy necessary equipment, chemicals

Do pilot experiment, optimize the conditions to get reliable data

Perform experiments, calculations, make everything multiple times so it's reliable

Analyze the data

Urge collaborators to deliver their parts

Coordinate your progress with the collaborators

Manage the collaborations, organize meetings

Be diplomatic, you don't want to make enemies in academia

Agree with direct colleagues, who worked on it, what will be the message of the article. Will it be a long story and we need to add some more data? Or will it be short and right to the point and we write a short "letter"?

Do literature research again. Maybe new stuff appeared, and for sure your data must be confronted and discussed with already known facts.

Write the first draft of the article

Send it around for feedback, first only to direct colleagues from your lab

Incorporate the feedback, maybe do more experiments and more analysis

Rewrite the manuscript

Send it around the second, third, fourth, fifth... time

Incorporate the feedback

Send the manuscript to all collaborators.

Wait for the feedback, urge everyone to give it, maybe you don't have all data from all the collaborators yet

Incorporate feedback

Prepare the manuscript for journal submission

Get approval from all co-authors

Submit the manuscript

Wait for editor response, hopefully they send it to reviewers. If not, you need to rewrite a bit the article to adhere to the new journal's format and send somewhere else.

Get reviewers' reports, deal with them, reply truthfully, make effort to explain everything even if you know that the reviewer's suggestion is just impossible or irrelevant. Be diplomatic.

Maybe you need to do an additional experiment, analysis, or rewrite a major part fo the manuscript. This can take months.

Submit revised manuscript with all the changes

Wait for editor's nad reviewers' comments in the second round. You can get many rounds of review and still get rejected.

Finally get a "Congratulations, your manuscript has been accepted for publication"

Pop a shampagne! You deserve it!

What part of this do you usually do in different career stages:

BSc. and MSc. students: Perform experiments and analyze data

PhD students: Do all the experimental and analysis parts, write the manuscript, discuss with their supervisor and direct colleagues, incorporate feedback. But does not have to come up with their own idea and manage collaborations and diplomacy.

Postdocs: Do literally everything on the list

Group leader/Professor: Do the thinking and managing parts, help with writing and feedback, provide discussions and insight. Do not perform actual experiments and analysis.

Being a postdoc is the transformation between the student and the group leader.

As such, we just have to do all these tasks. It's stressful. It's challenging. It's definitely not boring. I am taking every opportunity to get a student, who can help with the experimental repetitions so I have time for all the other stuff.

[mindblowingscience]

When you're a tiny nematode, electrical fields are positively uplifting. Literally. The most famous nematode of all – Caenorhabditis elegans – has been caught using electrical fields to its advantage. The tiny worm can somehow piggyback on electrical fields to jump a surprising distance, across a petri dish, for example, or onto the back of a bumblebee for a ride to a new locale. It's not entirely clear how the nematodes do this, but thanks to an experiment led by biologist Takuya Chiba of Hokkaido University in Japan, it's now apparent that these tiny animals use electrical fields to disperse far afield into new habitats. "Pollinators, such as insects and hummingbirds, are known to be electrically charged, and it is believed that pollen is attracted by the electric field formed by the pollinator and the plant," says biophysicist Takuma Sugi of Hiroshima University in Japan, co-senior author on the study.

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[miss-butterscotch]

29.07.2024 // 2.20pm green study aesthetic 🍵⋆｡°🍡°⋆. ࿔*:･

[bpod-bpod]

Growing to Order

Cells organise as they migrate or as tissue grows in ways analogous to liquid crystals. This study provides greater understanding of cell organisation taking into account the influence of adhesion between the cells and with their substrate

Read the published research paper here

Image from work by Julia Eckert and colleagues

Physics of Life Processes, Leiden Institute of Physics, Universiteit Leiden, Leiden, The Netherlands

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Nature Communications, September 2023

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[gesunderzellschutz]

Um sein Bestes zu geben, muss man körperlich und geistig fit sein.

Das Victory Patch wurde entwickelt, um Ihre sportliche Leistung zu verbessern, damit Sie bei jedem Spiel explosiver, beweglicher und konzentrierter sein können.

Mehrere informiert sein unter:

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[acadarnia]

mindmapping is the only way i can learn biophysics

i've never been a science person, but in 11th grade (when i started preparing for the med school admission exam) i developed an interest for chem/bio. however, math and physics were still my enemy :)

≈3 years later, i find them kind of cool, actually! i'm planning on trying to learn the basics of physics this summer. i think it would be cool

[gothassloser]

I’m a biophysicist and sometimes while reading a paper, i see sentencies that are so far away from everyday-speech that they sound shakespearian to me, i.e.

"the force balance at the protrusion edge, the noisy clutch of retrograde flow, and a response function of friction" (Amiri et al. 2023)

And in my head i was hearing it like Macbeth V,5 monolog

"Life, but a walking shadow, the noisy clutch of retrograde flow that struts and frets upon the stage and then is heard no more"

[bodyalive]

Not for the science-phobic. 

Seriously mind-boggling stuff, grounded in solid research.

"What if everything you were told about how the cells of your body get their energy was wrong? What if the body could tap the relatively limitless resources of the Sun directly? Even more astounding, what if the body could tap the infinite energy density of the quantum vacuum and even turn that energy into matter, as well as transform elements into one another? Welcome to the electrifying implications of the New "

~ Sayer Ji

[h/t Ian Sanders]

[davidzmind]

Happy Birthday Mária Telkes.

Mária Telkes was a Hungarian-American biophysicist and inventor who worked on solar energy technologies.

[miss-biophys]

My paper featured in the 50 best microbiology papers!

Our discovery of a new antibiotic target in bacteria was selected by a Nature Communications editor as one of the 50 best recently published papers in Microbiology and infectious diseases.

Search for "Lateral membrane organization" among the featured articles to find the research that I coordinated:

This surely gives me a boost for my next scientific work! Although it took ages to publish it (4 years this one) and A LOT of frustration, it was worth it!

[mindblowingscience]

Think of a monarch butterfly, and a distinctive image pops up: black-and-orange wings, with a sprinkling of white spots around the black edges. Those white spots may actually help monarchs complete their long-distance migration by altering the air flow around their wings. Or, at least, that's the provocative new claim from a team of researchers that has analyzed hundreds of monarch wings collected along its migration route. "If you have larger white spots, you're simply more successful at reaching Mexico," says Andy Davis, a researcher at the University of Georgia. He and his colleagues believe that the pattern of color could interact with sunlight to create subtle temperature differences on the wing that can alter airflow, easing the butterflies' flight.

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[academiceurope]

Job - Alert 🚀

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