BIO503 Official Handouts

Course Code: BIO503

Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that applies the approaches and methods of physics to study biological systems. Biophysical research shares significant overlap with biochemistry, physical chemistry, nanotechnology, bioengineering, computational biology, biomechanics and systems biology. Biophysics covers all scales of biological organization, from molecular to organismic and populations. Bridge between biology and physics.

Study of biological systems and biological processes using physics-based methods or based on physical principles. Biophysics discovers how atoms are arranged to work in DNA and proteins. Biophysicists are discovering how proteins work, they use these protein structures for discovering how biological machines work, in health and also in diseases. Biophysicists study life at every level, from atoms and molecules to cells, organisms, and environments.

Biophysicists ask questions, such as: How do protein machines work? Even though they are millions of times smaller than everyday machines, molecular machines work on the same principles. They also use energy to do work. How do systems of nerve cells communicate? How do proteins pack DNA into viruses? How do viruses invade cells? How do plants harness sunlight to make food? Understanding of life by studying fundamental physical principles and mechanisms by which living organisms survive, adapt, and grow.

Fundamental experimental work in areas such as molecular structure and dynamics, photosynthesis, or cell membranes.

Study evolution, neural dynamics, electron transfer, and non-linear phenomena such as heart rhythms or organism development.

Today, biophysics seeks to answer diverse biological questions, such as How are tiny molecules in our environment detected by a sense organ and converted into electrical impulses that provide the brain with information about the external world?

Biophysics is a growing enterprise world-wide, driven primarily by the widespread realization of the major contributions made to biological science by a combination of truly state-of-the-art physical measurements with modern molecular biology.

The field occupies a unique and central position at the intersection of the biological, chemical, physical, and computational sciences

Biophysicists are driven primarily by their curiosity about how biological systems work at the molecular level

Development and advancement of new techniques and approaches. Biophysicists as a group most often develop the novel, sophisticated experimental methods that reveal molecular level details with unique clarity. Biophysics is a molecular science that seeks to explain biological function in terms of the molecular structures and properties of specific molecules. Size of these molecules varies dramatically:

Small fatty acids and sugars (1 nanometer), Macromolecules such as proteins (5 to 10 nm), Starches (greater than 1,000 nm and longer than the thickness of a human hair)

Enormously elongated DNA molecules (more than 1 centimeter long but only 20 nm wide, or the scaled equivalent of a piece of string 45 miles long). These biomolecules, the sole building blocks of living organisms, assemble into cells, tissues and whole organisms by forming complex individual structures that are visible under a light microscope. The most famous biophysicist, Francis Crick, was one of three people who won the Nobel Prize for this accomplishment. The team used data from a technique known as X-ray crystallography, which revealed the physical patterns of DNA.

So exactly what did he do? 50 years before “biophysics” was a trendy college major, he approached DNA as a physics problem. What he and James Watson did was to piece together just exactly what DNA looks like physically, the spiral-staircase shape. Experiments in the 1940’s showed that genes are made of a simple chemical–DNA. How such a simple chemical could be the molecule of inheritance remained a mystery until biophysicists discovered the DNA double helix in 1953. During the 2000’s, biophysical inventions decoded all the genes in a human being (Human genome project). All the genes of nearly 200 different species, and some genes from more than 100,000 other species have been determined. Biophysicists analyze those genes to learn how organisms are related and how individuals differ.

HISTORY OF BIOPHYSICS

Biophysics is a relatively young discipline (1960) but its origins go back a long way. Basic biophysics concepts can be detected as far back as the mid-nineteenth century, at the Berlin Physiology School, if not earlier still, in the eighteenth-century British Physiology School (Cavendish, Walsh). Biophysics might even be seen as dating back to the times of Volta and Galvani.

The popularity of biophysics rose sharply in 1944 when the book “What is life” by Erwin Schrodinger (1933 nobel prize for physics) was published.

By 1950, as many as 200 institutions throughout the world had adopted the term Biophysics in their name. The American Biophysics Society was founded in 1957.

In Italy, the new discipline was initially promoted by three world-leading scientists: Antonino Borsellino in Genoa, Adriano Gozzini in Pisa and Mario Ageno in Rome.

In 1959 a series of conferences on Bio-Physics and Bio-Chemistry was organized in Genoa and in other cities. Back then, it was considered extremely novel for physics scientists to have common interests with medicine and biology scientists.

The establishment of the Italian Biophysical Society dates back to 1960. The first National Biophysics Congress was held in Italy from 3 to 5 June 1963.

Biophysics Importance

The importance of Biophysics is highlighted by variety of outstanding drug withdrawals in recent years. Each of these withdrawals was preceded by severe or fatal adverse effects that had been unrecognized or underappreciated at the time of approval. exploitation the tools of Biophysics, it's potential to spot adverse effects that will be unnoted in irregular trials as a result of those adverse effects square measure uncommon, represent a rise in risk from Associate in Nursing already high baseline occur primarily in patient teams underrepresented in clinical trials, need several months or years to develop, occur primarily with co-administration of specific alternative medication, and/or occur primarily in patients with a particular comorbidity or genotype. Biophysics importance articles from OMICS Group are an open access articles named in Journal of Physical Chemistry & Biophysics which strives to release issues quarterly and is adamant to publish new findings related to the field of Biophysics importance. Risks and benefits are commonly identified only after a drug is widely used by the general population. Observational study designs are essential for the study of risks and benefits associated with marketed drugs. Regulatory agencies are under pressure to identify and respond to post approval Biophysics issues and work with stakeholders on risk management and risk communication.

While some colleges and universities have dedicated departments of biophysics, usually at the graduate level, many do not have university-level biophysics departments, instead having groups in related departments such as biochemistry, cell biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, neuroscience, pharmacology, physics, and physiology. Depending on the strengths of a department at a university differing emphasis will be given to fields of biophysics. What follows is a list of examples of how each department applies its efforts toward the study of biophysics. This list is hardly all inclusive. Nor does each subject of study belong exclusively to any particular department. Each academic institution makes its own rules and there is much overlap between departments. Biology and molecular biology – Almost all forms of biophysics efforts are included in some biology department somewhere. Typical examples include: gene regulation, single protein dynamics, bioenergetics, patch clamping, biomechanics, virophysics. Structural biology – Ångstrom-resolution structures of proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, carbohydrates, and complexes thereof. Biochemistry and chemistry – biomolecular structure, siRNA, nucleic acid structure, structureactivity relationships. Computer science – Neural networks, biomolecular and drug databases.

Computational chemistry – molecular dynamics simulation, molecular docking, quantum chemistry Bioinformatics – sequence alignment, structural alignment, protein structure prediction

Mathematics – graph/network theory, population modeling, dynamical systems, phylogenetics.

Medicine – biophysical research that emphasizes medicine.