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 the ribosomal tunnel constriction, formed by proteins uL4 and uL22, functions as a dynamic flexible gate that adapts its width in response to nascent polypeptide presence, shifting from transient occlusion to accommodating helical structures, thereby influencing translocation, antibiotic action, and translation regulation.
This study elucidates the molecular architecture and conformational dynamics of the Pseudomonas transceptor CbrA by determining its cryo-EM structure, which reveals how the small peptide CbrX stabilizes the SLC5 transporter domain and defines the proton-driven mechanism linking histidine sensing and transport to downstream signaling.
This paper introduces FluoroCubes, a novel system of fluorescently labeled DNA nanostructures grafted onto PDMS substrates, which serve as stable, high-density fiducial markers to significantly enhance the spatial resolution and sensitivity of traction force microscopy compared to conventional fluorescent beads.
By combining machine learning, theoretical modeling, and single-cell RNA sequencing data, this study reveals that coordinated cell-wide variability in gene expression serves as a distinct signature of cellular identity and regulatory organization, particularly distinguishing stem and progenitor cells from heterogeneous populations.
This study demonstrates that a minimal elastic actomyosin network, driven solely by the interplay between contractile forces and force-sensitive adhesion turnover, can spontaneously break symmetry and generate directed polarized motion without requiring external cues or complex chemical signaling.
This study develops a coarse-grained model that explicitly incorporates residue-level desolvation energetics to reveal how these forces reshape the thermodynamic landscape and kinetic dynamics of biomolecular liquid-liquid phase separation, offering improved predictions of condensate properties and conformational compaction.
This study demonstrates that stearic acid promotes the stability and growth of *Staphylococcus epidermidis* by simultaneously fluidizing the lipid membrane and increasing peptidoglycan stiffness, thereby enhancing overall cell envelope integrity.
This paper introduces torch-projectors, a high-performance, differentiable library for Fourier-space projections in PyTorch that significantly accelerates electron microscopy workflows by outperforming existing solutions by 1–2 orders of magnitude across CPU, Apple Silicon, and CUDA devices.
This study reveals that intracellular TDP-43 amyloid formation specifically nucleates from dynamically arrested nascent condensates of its C-terminal domain, a process that is uniquely enabled by pre-existing amyloid templates and suppressed when condensation progresses beyond this arrested state.
By combining 3D-reconstructed placental villi with computational diffusion modeling, this study demonstrates that classical stereological methods systematically overestimate the placental diffusive length scale by 15–25% due to unaccounted interface curvature, highlighting the need for geometry-aware corrections in structure-function analyses.