Biophysical Conference 2019

Session

Not scheduled

Terrace ballroom (Hotel Amfora, Hvar, Croatia)

Contribution list Timetable

10. A hydraulic instability regulates cell death and Oocyte size selection in C.elegans germline

Arghyadip Mukherjee (MPI-PKS)

Poster

The process of making an oocyte starting from a germline tissue is a fundamental cellular process.Oogenesis demonstrates remarkable mechanical as well as hydrodynamic phenomena across organisms. Dynamic size regulation and mechanical symmetry breaking in germ cell population (within a syncytia) leads to heterogeneous growth leading to cell fate decisions. The roundworm C. elegans has a...

23. A Model of the Cellular Resource Allocation Strategy in Bacteria

Dr Anjan Roy (ICTP, Italy)

Poster

The central target of the bacterial life is to survive, and one of the central task to achieve this target is for the bacterial cell to grow. The machine which is responsible for performing the bulk of this task is the Ribosome. However, it not only has to produce all the required proteins of the cell but also copies of itself, to be divided among its daughter cells so as to keep this process...

14. Actin(g) on phase separation

Tina Wiegand (Hyman)

Poster

F-actin networks play a crucial role for cellular integrity and induction of shape changes during development and homeostasis. Actin polymerization is therefore highly regulated by multiple pathways and means such as local monomer concentration, nucleating and sequestering factors. Recently, actin partioning into biomolecular condensates has been reported as additional mechanism to transiently...

16. Decoding dynamic coiled-coils

Dr Marcus Jahnel (MPI-CBG)

Poster

How biomolecules reliably generate mechanical forces and torques in a fluctuating environment is an enduring problem of biological physics and molecular biology.

An unusual pair recently found to generate forces are the long membrane tethering protein early endosome antigen 1 (EEA1) — a 220 nm long coiled-coil protein — and the small GTPase Rab5*. Binding of the small GTPase to the end of...

7. Fluctuating Energetics in Long Range Interacting Systems

Ashwin Gopal

Poster

Long-range interacting systems are characterized by interaction potentials that decay slowly with the separation distance, e.g. with power-law dependencies. Such systems give rise to a plethora of intriguing physical phenomena such as ensemble in-equivalence, ergodicity breaking, synchronization, etc. The dynamics of long-range interacting systems in bounded domains can be quantitatively...

27. How the size of a cell can determine its fate

Dr Julia Pfanzelter (BIOTEC)

Poster

Production of viable oocytes is an essential process during sexual reproduction. The C. elegans gonad is composed of roughly 1000 germ cells, half of which develop into oocytes while the rest undergo apoptosis. These dying cells are thought to act as nurse cells donating material to their growing neighbours. Long-range cytoplasmic flows through the connecting tube of this syncytial tissue...

15. Investigating actin nucleation through active phase separation

Ms Victoria Victoria Yan

Poster

In the cytoplasm, proteins observed in liquid-like phases are thought to contribute to compartmentalization of the cytoplasm. However, it is unclear whether demixing of cytoskeletal components could also play a role in partitioning actin nucleators to the membrane during the formation of an actomyosin cortex. Members of the N-Wasp Cdc-42 Arp2/3 nucleation pathway contain intrinsically...

25. Mechanism of pioneer transcription factor binding to the DNA

Mr sandeep choubey

Poster

The mechanistic details of how pioneer transcription factors exert their functions over a range of specific targets in a timely and coordinated way during early development remains in its infancy. For instance, zygotic genome activation (ZGA) in fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, is largely controlled by a protein called Zelda, a pioneer factor, binds at the vicinity of multiple developmental...

28. Microtubule bundle formation

Mr Marcel Prelogović (University of Zagreb, Faculty of science)

Poster

During mitosis, microtubules form a spindle, which is responsible for the segregation of chromosomes. In yeast cells, the spindle has a rod-like structure and is made of microtubules emanating from two poles connected by cross-linking proteins. Microtubules self-organize into parallel or antiparallel bundles, depending on whether they grow from the same or two different poles and our goal here...

9. Opticals Tweezers: Force Sensors for Unzipping the Coiled-Coil EEA1

Christoph Ehrlich

Poster

Optical Tweezers are a nowadays common tool to study the single molecule world. As force sensors, they are especially interesting to investigate binding energies and, due to their high spatial and temporal resolution, protein dynamics (e.g. polymerases). However, careful calibration of an optical tweezers setup is required in order to achieve that resolution. Berg-Sørensen and Flyvbjerg (2003)...

24. Patterning of Cytokinetic ring

Mr Sourabh Monnappa Kuppanda Jafri (Biotec, Technische Univeristat Dresden)

Poster

Cytokinesis is a fundamental step of cell division. This event results in the assembly of circumferential actomyosin-based contractile ring at the equatorial cortex of the cell. The contractile ring is positioned properly by the spatiotemporal cues from the mitotic spindle to the cortex. Experiments have revealed that the localization of myosin in the contractile ring is controlled via the...

30. Probing Chemical and Geometrical Properties of Crystal Surfaces with First Passage Times

Mr Muhammad Nawaz Qaisrani ([1] The International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy [2] The Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics(ICTP), Trieste, Italy)

Poster

The statistics of first passage times (FPT) is used widely in the field of statistical physics. In this work, we study the FPT distributions of water near three different crystal surfaces of the amino acid glutamine. We show that each surface leaves a unique fingerprint of the structural and geometrical properties of crystal in the FPT distributions. We also establish a...

32. Quantification of individual myosin minifilaments in the cortex of the C. elegans zygote

Fereshteh Rafieian

Poster

Contractile forces generated in the actomyosin cortex of cells drive many different processes during cellular and tissue morphogenesis. In the cortex, Nonmuscle myosin motors assemble into bipolar minifilaments, crosslink actin filaments and exert forces on them. Physical descriptions of the cortex link the myosin activity to the cortical dynamics at the cellular level and singling pathways...

20. Stochastic model for error propagation over multiple cell generations

Ivana Ban (Faculty of science, University of Zagreb)

Poster

Chromosome segregation during cell division is carefully choreographed to ensure equal partitioning of the duplicated genetic material. If this process fails to occur accurately, the resulting daughters might have karyotype imbalance, known as aneuploidy. Even though mitotic errors have been studied extensively, the mechanisms generating various errors, their propagation and effects on genome...

29. The Empty Space in Liquids and its Role in Hosting Small Polymers

Dr Narjes Ansari

Poster

Here we present insights into the nature of structural heterogeneities in liquid water by characterizing the empty space in the hydrogen bond network. Using molecular dynamics simulations and a battery of data analysis tools, we show that density fluctuations create regions of empty space characterized by a diverse morphology - from spherical to dendritic voids. The environment of the voids...

4. The journey of a pioneer transcription factor towards its target sequence.

Dr Jose Alberto Morin (MPI-CBG)

Poster

Non-membrane bound compartments, exhibiting material properties ranging from classic liquids to gel-like play a mayor role in cell material compartmentalization. These granules are commonly composed of nucleic acid-binding proteins containing low complexity domains. Using state of the art optical tweezers coupled with fluorescence microscopy we will explore, starting at the single molecule...

37. Tissue-scale flows in the early quail embryo

Arjun Narayanan (MPI-CBG)

Poster

The coherent tissue-scale motion of cells in early quail embryos include the well-described “polonaise motion” of cells during the formation of the primitive streak and the less well-studied chiral flow of cells at the tip of the streak just before streak retraction. Passive flows ranging in scale from molecular fluids to sand dunes share a common description in terms of the types of forces...

36. Two Stochastic Resetting applications to Biophysics

Daniel Sanchez-Taltavull (Visceral Surgery, Department of BioMedical Science, University of Bern, Murtenstrasse 35, 3013 Bern, Switzerland.)

Poster

Biophysics is a growing field that involves mathematical modelling and data analysis to study biological, medical and ecological processes. In this presentation we show two applications of stochastic resetting to understand drug resistance development and RNA transcription.
Drug resistance development is the process in which the current therapy against an infection is decreased in...

22. Uncovering the physical constraints on cell shape for a functional actomyosin ring during cytokinesis

Julia Garcia (Student)

Poster

Cytokinesis is a fundamental cellular process, which consists in the physical division of a cell into two, once the genetic material has been replicated. In animal cells, this is achieved by constriction of an actomyosin ring assembled to the equatorial cell cortex. For cytokinesis to take place, the shape of the cell during cell division might be essential. Indeed, most eukaryotic cells round...