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Hello and welcome to this week’s #DBIOTweetorial by Prof. Madhusudhan Venkadesan @v_madhu. Let’s go! 
Feet and fins are quite different in their anatomy. But both have to be stiff enough to withstand the forces of propulsion. Are there deeper connections between them?
Paper: dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature…
Video:
Paper: dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature…
Video:
All land vertebrates, or tetrapods, evolved from aquatic ancestors over 370 million years ago. So we and all land vertebrates are fish, in a manner of speaking!
Limbs evolved from fins, but the earliest tetrapod probably used a fin to move on land.
Ref: jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16…
Limbs evolved from fins, but the earliest tetrapod probably used a fin to move on land.
Ref: jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16…
Hello, it's a gorgeous Thursday! Time for a #DBIOTweetorial. A special edition this week — an inaugural *Editweetorial* by your host today, Prof. Bill Bialek @wbialek. #DBIOEditweetorial
Biological systems are complicated. If we try to make “realistic” models we are led into a forest of parameters. If we are going to have a theoretical physicist’s understanding of life, we have to find principles that cut through this complexity.
Maybe a #DBIOEditweetorial provides just enough space to summarize different strategies in the search for principles. Links are to papers that illustrate these ideas, and of course are just a sampling. Please respond with your own favorites.
Have you seen images of bacteria and wondered, “How do they form such strange shapes?” or “Why do they all look so different?” Join us for today's #DBIOTweetorial as we dive into how and why bacteria adopt the shapes they do! #EngageDBIO @goleylab @jordanmbarrows
As Kevin Young eloquently put it, “To be brutally honest, few people care that bacteria have different shapes. Which is a shame, because the bacteria seem to care very much.” Check out how diverse bacterial shapes can be! tinyurl.com/6d93vce4 tinyurl.com/uvbtwvs3
Bacterial shape is largely determined by the peptidoglycan (PG) cell wall, a large macromolecule that surrounds cells and provides structure and support. PG is necessary to maintain cell shape - cells burst when treated with drugs that target PG!
tinyurl.com/m4dys6hb
tinyurl.com/m4dys6hb
Are the screaming BroodX cicadas driving you nuts? Wonder how such tiny insects even make such a racket? You’ve come to the right place! I study how insects make and hear sound. By the end of this I hope I can show what biophysical marvels they are! #DBIOTweetorial @NatashaMhatre
So what is sound? It’s a disturbance in a medium, generated by a moving object. In this cool gif, by @drussellpsu, you can you see a grey bar moving back and forth within a pipe. The air in the pipe is pushed around, and the disturbance within it (sound) travels through the air.
So anything that moves makes a sound?
Yup, pretty much! The world is full of it: the wind shakes leaves, they rustle; tires vibrate because of friction, and they rumble.
But how ‘loud’ the sound is depends on quite a few things!
frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…
Yup, pretty much! The world is full of it: the wind shakes leaves, they rustle; tires vibrate because of friction, and they rumble.
But how ‘loud’ the sound is depends on quite a few things!
frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…
It's #DBIOtweetorial time, with your host @gibbological from @isbsci. Today, you'll get some facts about the ~10^13 microbes that call your gut home. By the end, I hope that you'll see yourself as much more than a mere human. You are an ecosystem! #EngageDBIO #microbiome 💩🦠🧑🔬
In the womb, we are sterile (obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…). At birth, our mothers (and surrounding environment) act as our 'sour-dough starter culture,' inoculating us with hundreds-to-thousands of species. The exact composition of this 'microbiome' is as unique to us as our genome.
Topologically speaking, humans are doughnuts. The entire outside of this doughnut is *covered* in microbes (mostly bacteria). Most of our microbes live in the colon. There are about 3*10^13 human cells and 4*10^13 bacterial cells in the body (doi.org/10.1371/journa…).
It's #DBIOtweetorial time! Your host is Saad Bhamla @BhamlaLab. Today we'll learn about 10 ultrafast movements in organisms - from single cells to multicellular beasts. We hope to get you thinking engg+bio+physics of extreme movements.
#EngageDBIO #UltrafastOrganisms.
#EngageDBIO #UltrafastOrganisms.
Contrary to common perception, cheetahs and falcons are not the fastest animals. Mantis shrimps for example can use a saddle-shaped spring to hammer at ~100,000 m/s^2. This is so blazing fast, it cavitates surrounding fluid. nature.com/articles/42881…
Trap jaw ants use their spring-loaded jaws to jump at faster acceleration of 10^6 m/s^2 in 0.06 ms. Faster than the blink of an eye or a bullet from a gun !! How to build robots at this scale and speed remains an open challenge. pnas.org/content/103/34…
It's #DBIOtweetorial time! Your host, Wallace Marshall. Welcome to 10 Crazy Things Cells Do. We hope to get you thinking about the complexity of cells + challenges in learning physical principles that underly cell behavior. Let's get started!
#EngageDBIO #XtremeCellBiology.
#EngageDBIO #XtremeCellBiology.
Cells can be really big. Many cells are small, but some are gigantic. Each little "plant" in this picture is a single algal cell, Acetabularia, more than 10 cm long. What determines the size of cells? bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…
Cells can walk. You think of cells creeping along on a glass slide, but cells can move in more complex ways. @BEuplotes studies cells that can walk using 14 tiny feet. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
Hello, it’s a gorgeous Thursday! Time for a #DBIOtweetorial by Eleni Katifori, commissioned by the awesome folks at #engageDBIO! Let's get sciencing!
Large organisms cannot survive without a circulatory system. Diffusion is too slow to provide enough nutrients. For this reason, plants, animals and fungi have evolved complex irrigation systems.
Circulatory systems roughly follow some simple design principles. They are composed of wide vessels, “highways” for long distance transport, and smaller, distributary channels, which do the actual delivery of the load. Similar function can result in similar design!
It is Thursday, must be time for a #DBIOTweetorial, brought to you by @NavishWadhwa and Yuhai Tu. We will drop in the tweets over the next hour or so. Counting on you to comment, ask questions, have discussions…let’s show the world that biophysicists don’t hold back. #EngageDBIO
Gather up, friends. Did you see the internet-famous structure of the bacterial flagellar motor? Did it make you want to know more? Then buckle up, we are about to take a deep dive into nature’s most marvelous bio-nanomachine.
First, a quick recap. Many bacteria swim by rotating helical flagella. Rotation of these flagella is powered by a highly complex bio-nanomachine, the flagellar motor. It is a full-on electric motor, complete with a stator, a rotor, a driveshaft, a universal joint, and bushings.
Once again, it's a lovely Thursday! Time for a #DBIOtweetorial by Kim Reynolds @kimreynolds_lab commissioned by the awesome folks at #engageDBIO! Let's get sciencing!
An organism’s genome encodes the rules for how it looks, grows, and responds to the environment in a series of “A”s, “C”s, “G”s and “T”s:
The genes encode proteins – molecular “parts” that assemble into cellular systems. For example, we often depict proteins in metabolism as lines that interconvert chemical species inside the cell. These diagrams contain a lot of information, but can be difficult to understand.
It's a beautiful Thursday! Time for a #DBIOtweetorial on bacterial cell division by @BioSciRy and @PetraLevin at the request of the awesome folks at #engageDBIO!
On a first glance, bacterial cell division may seem simple. In reality, it is the culmination of precisely orchestrated interplay between cytoplasmic and extracellular processes. #EngageDBIO #DBIOTweetorial
To divide, bacteria must: grow, replicate and segregate their chromosome, add new cell wall perpendicular to the old cell wall, and separate. That’s a lot of work! #EngageDBIO #DBIOTweetorial
It’s Tweetorial Thursday, so time for a #DBIOtweetorial, brought to you by the fantastic #engageDBIO team! Guest this week @SulianaManley, on why there is “No free lunch in microscopy”
For biophysicists, microscopy is a major tool and an exciting outlet for innovation. If you are a microscopy user more than a developer, it can seem like a major new method is published every week! Even just considering localization microscopy ...
So, how do we make sense of all this method development, and what is driving it? Sometimes developers chase world records in spatial resolution, temporal resolution, depth, or long-term imaging.
Like a city, inside of the cell is organised by highways and roads (microtubules, actin), motors (dynein, kinesins, myosins) cargoes (e.g. receptors in endosomes, viruses) post-offices sorting cargoes (sorting endosomes), garbage clean-up (autophagosomes, lysosomes) and much more
Every piece of the puzzle listed above is a field on its own! We now know about the exquisite dynamics of microtubules, or how motors move. We know about the process of endocytosis at the plasma membrane and proteins that define distinct endosomal populations (Rabs)
It's a beautiful thursday! time for a #DBIOtweetorial commissioned by the awesome folks at #engageDBIO!
First up: “this feather star has too many arms and is too heavy to swim – instead it creeps along the seafloor”
How goes this amazing creature coordinate so many appendages? what kind of physics does it encounter?
How goes this amazing creature coordinate so many appendages? what kind of physics does it encounter?
When discussing limb coordination, it's probably easier to define what we mean by coordination than 'limb'...
doi.org/10.1038/44416
You might recognise this famous image of '#synchronization', referred to by Huygens as 'an odd kind of sympathy' (1665)
jstor.org/stable/4027017…
doi.org/10.1038/44416
You might recognise this famous image of '#synchronization', referred to by Huygens as 'an odd kind of sympathy' (1665)
jstor.org/stable/4027017…
