388 papers
Biophysics sits at the fascinating intersection where the laws of physics meet the complexity of living systems. This field uses tools like light, electricity, and mechanical forces to decode how cells move, how proteins fold, and how our senses translate the world around us. Rather than just observing biology, biophysicists measure and model life to understand the fundamental machinery that powers every organism.
On Gist.Science, we make these discoveries accessible by curating the latest preprints directly from bioRxiv. Our team processes every new submission in this category, providing both clear, plain-language overviews and detailed technical summaries so readers of all backgrounds can grasp the cutting-edge science. Below are the most recent biophysics papers from bioRxiv, ready for you to explore.
The authors present a Gouy-Chapman-based continuum electrostatics model, accompanied by a Python implementation, to predict how salt concentration and membrane composition shift the effective pKa of ionizable lipids in lipid nanoparticles, thereby aiding in the optimization of RNA delivery formulations.
This study reveals that protein language models like ESM-2 function as evolutionary grammar compressors that capture macroscopic sequence statistics rather than microscopic 3D geometries, leading to a fundamental conflation of distinct thermodynamic phases and topological anomalies due to their reliance on statistical correlations over explicit physical folding principles.
This study employs molecular dynamics simulations to demonstrate that the polyQ tract length and sequence context within the disordered ELF3-PrD domain modulate temperature-sensitive helix formation and the exposure of aromatic residues, thereby governing the heat-induced condensation of the Evening Complex that regulates plant growth.
This study introduces a Metabolic Spin-Glass model optimized by quantum annealing to recast cancer metabolism as a frustrated many-body system, revealing that malignant phenotypes represent distinct thermodynamic ground states where the Warburg effect emerges as a phase transition and enabling the identification of prognostically distinct patient subtypes through a novel energy-based order parameter.
This study uses molecular dynamics simulations to demonstrate that specific LQT2-associated missense mutations in hERG channels impair trafficking by allosterically disrupting the structural integrity of the selectivity filter, while identifying a second-site variant that can correct these defects.
This study introduces a label-free, depth-adaptive 4D holotomography framework to longitudinally quantify single lipid droplet dynamics in living hepatic organoids, revealing that oleic acid and linoleic acid drive lipid accumulation through distinct mechanisms of droplet enlargement versus proliferation, respectively, while palmitic acid rapidly compromises organoid integrity.
This study demonstrates the repeatable execution on real quantum hardware (IBM Pittsburgh) of a minimal four-qubit surrogate model for fast local-topology hyperthermal sarcomeric oscillations, achieving strong agreement between experimental results and exact simulations for key biologically interpretable observables.
This paper presents a wavelength-scanning replica-removal method using polarization gratings that doubles the effective field of view in common-path digital holographic microscopy, enabling high-quality, speckle-reduced imaging of dense biological samples in both time-domain and single-shot modes.
This study utilizes cryo-electron microscopy to reveal that both DNA roadblocks and converging RNA polymerase collisions induce a common backtracking swivel mechanism in *E. coli* RNA polymerase, while also identifying distinct dynamic features and regulatory factors that govern how these transcriptional conflicts are resolved.
This paper presents a two-stage physics-based computational framework that combines weighted ensemble simulations with the RiteWeight reweighting algorithm to harmonize diverse AI-generated protein structure ensembles into a consistent, atomically-detailed equilibrium state.