329 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.
Contrary to the prevailing belief that bacteria maintain constant membrane fluidity across all temperatures, this study reveals that Gram-positive bacteria exhibit a two-component regime where fluidity is homeostatically regulated only at low temperatures (<26°C) but increases freely at higher temperatures.
The authors introduce Combi-PAINT, a novel method combining combinatorial super-resolved DNA-PAINT multiplexing with high-efficiency RNA labeling and MINFLUX microscopy to enable nanometer-precision, three-dimensional visualization of multiple distinct mRNA species and their transcript-specific ultrastructures within human cells.
This study demonstrates that machine learning models can independently detect human stress with over 90% accuracy by analyzing sub-THz electromagnetic reflections from sweat ducts, establishing a new remote sensing method without relying on traditional markers like Galvanic Skin Response.
This paper revisits and adapts time-resolved resonance Raman spectroscopy with continuous-wave excitation for modern confocal spectrometers using a rotating cell, demonstrating that while this setup significantly reduces data acquisition time, it requires a more complex optical configuration and yields lower photoconversion efficiency compared to traditional 90-degree-scattering slit spectrometers.
Although molecular simulations suggest that chlorotoxin and its fragments bind favorably to non-catalytic regions of MMP-2 and inhibit glioblastoma cell migration, they do not directly inhibit MMP-2 enzymatic activity, indicating that chlorotoxin likely targets alternative mechanisms in glioblastoma.
This study introduces a "shape-as-signal" strategy using fully genetically encoded, low-molecular-weight protein tags with defined rigid geometries to enable the direct, unambiguous identification of specific proteins within crowded cellular environments via cryo-electron tomography without the need for bulky exogenous probes.
This study demonstrates that multiconformer ensemble models derived from high-resolution X-ray crystallography can accurately predict protein-ligand binding entropies by jointly accounting for the conformational entropies of both the protein and solvent, thereby enabling explicit entropic considerations in structure-based drug design.
This manuscript, titled "Quantifying lipids in human cells using Raman spectroscopy," has been withdrawn by the authors due to identified inaccuracies requiring further refinement, and they request that it not be cited.
This paper challenges the reliance on native sequence recovery (NSR) as the primary metric for protein design models by introducing PottsMPNN, which sacrifices NSR performance to achieve superior sequence generation and energy landscape prediction through training on noised structures and multiple sequence alignments.