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.
This study reveals that spatially correlated fluctuations in the nucleoplasm, driven by active processes and chromatin crosslinking, cause nearby chromosomal loci to move coherently, thereby slowing their relative diffusion and fundamentally altering the kinetics of nuclear encounters essential for gene regulation.
This paper presents a quantitative theory explaining how the spherical cell body of *Chlamydomonas* acts as a lens to create internal light caustics, causing "eyeless" mutants to exhibit reversed phototaxis because their flagellar response is dominated by the rapidly varying lensed signal rather than the direct illumination.
This paper introduces edENM, an essential dynamics-refined elastic network model parametrized with molecular dynamics simulations to accurately capture the conformational dynamics of DNA, RNA, and protein-nucleic acid complexes, which is integrated into the eBDIMS framework to simulate large-scale functional motions in systems like chromatin subunits and ribosomes.
This paper introduces SAP (Segment Any Plant), a training-free, few-shot framework leveraging the pretrained Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) to enable accurate, automated segmentation and quantitative time-series phenotyping of diverse plant structures across various species and imaging conditions without requiring task-specific retraining.
This study demonstrates that transcription factor hub formation is an emergent property of enhancer-encoded binding kinetics driven by motif number, rather than a mechanism that actively increases target occupancy or predicts transcriptional burst behavior.
This paper presents a modular protein ladder based on engineered TPR motifs and self-labeling enzymes that serves as a universal benchmark to standardize and harmonize FRET distance measurements across diverse experimental platforms, expression systems, and labeling strategies, thereby enabling the direct translation of in vitro data to intracellular environments.
This study presents a novel discrete mathematical model and its derived continuum reaction-diffusion limit to simulate curvature-controlled biological tissue growth, demonstrating how mechanical cell interactions and spatial constraints drive interface smoothing consistent with experimental observations.
This study demonstrates that introducing a proline residue at site 2 in the M2-M3 linker of the subunit, but not the subunit, of heteromeric GABA receptors acts as a molecular brake reliever that biases the channel toward an activated state, thereby enhancing GABA sensitivity and spontaneous activity.
This study introduces "chlamylipo," a bio-hybrid micro-swimmer where a *Chlamydomonas reinhardtii* alga encapsulated in a giant liposome achieves self-propelled swimming and phototaxis by transmitting internal flagellar forces across the lipid bilayer through periodic membrane deformations and coupled viscous fluid flows.
Using large-scale molecular dynamics simulations, this study reveals that Nanog, Oct4, and Sox2 form phase-separated transcriptional condensates with non-additive, emergent properties where DNA acts as a spatial organizer that enhances Oct4 recruitment, establishing a synergistic "deliverer-receiver" mechanism that adds a new layer of gene expression regulation beyond canonical binding.