APS-DBIO Profile picture
Twitter account for the APS Division of Biological Physics (DBIO).
Nikoloz Tsikolia Profile picture 1 subscribed
Oct 7, 2021 13 tweets 9 min read
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:
Aug 5, 2021 12 tweets 5 min read
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 Image 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.
Jun 17, 2021 12 tweets 8 min read
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
Jun 10, 2021 12 tweets 8 min read
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.
Jun 3, 2021 12 tweets 10 min read
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.
May 27, 2021 11 tweets 9 min read
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. 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…
May 20, 2021 12 tweets 8 min read
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. 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…
May 13, 2021 12 tweets 5 min read
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.
May 6, 2021 12 tweets 6 min read
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.
Apr 29, 2021 11 tweets 6 min read
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:
Apr 22, 2021 10 tweets 11 min read
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
Apr 15, 2021 11 tweets 4 min read
@taekjip is taking over @ApsDbio today to run a tweetorial titled 'single is good but a couple is better'. Single molecule methods are allowing direct detection of subpopulations & dynamics, and correlation between multiple observables, with rapidly rising popularity. Technical milestones in single molecule fluorescence can be seen here.
Apr 8, 2021 9 tweets 5 min read
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 ...
Apr 1, 2021 11 tweets 5 min read
It's Thursday and time for a #DBIOtweetorial commissioned by the awesome folks at #engageDBIO! 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
Mar 25, 2021 11 tweets 8 min read
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?