Browse our latest Physics of Living Systems articles

The Frank–Starling law of the heart and its underlying mechanism of length-dependent activation involve distinctive structural changes in both the thin and thick filaments of cardiac muscle cells.

Combining quantitative biological experiment and physical description of actomyosin cortex reveals a contractile instability in the cortex of C. elegans embryo, and its biochemical control in order to robustly drive morphogenetic events.

The geometry selection rules of dynamic Min protein patterns are determined in fully confined fluidic chambers, showing that both oscillations and running waves are derivatives of spiral rotations that are established as the majority pattern.

Autocatalytic growth of a microtubule polymer network allows extremely large egg cells to self-organize and divide rapidly.

The colony-forming choanoflagellate Salpingoeca rosetta is capable of moving towards oxygen using logarithmic sensing of oxygen concentrations and a navigation strategy that involves random movements.

Compressing the actomyosin network by cortical flow causes filaments to align and form a constricting ring.

Recent reports on the ability of biological molecules to sense magnetic fields are found to be inconsistent with basic physical principles.

The overall energy conversion efficiency is calculated for a bacterial vesicle that harvests solar energy for ATP production on the basis of an atomic-detail structural model.

The ability of hair cells to produce an electrical signal in response to a mechanical stimulus stems from tension in the elastic tip links within the bundles.