Theoretical Biology of The Cell

This interdisciplinary collection of surveys highlights the central role played by the mathematical modeling of mechanical properties having an effect on the biology, chemistry, and physics of living matter.

LIFE - as a Matter of Fat
Lipidomics is the science of the fats called lipids. Lipids are as important for life as proteins, sugars, and genes. The present book gives a multi-disciplinary perspective on the physics of life and the particular role played by lipids and the lipid-bilayer component of cell membranes. The book is aimed at undergraduate students and young research workers within physics, chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology, nutrition, as well as pharmaceutical and biomedical sciences. The emphasis is on the physical properties of lipid membranes seen as soft and molecularly structured interfaces. By combining and synthesizing insights obtained from a variety of recent studies, an attempt is made to clarify what membrane structure is and how it can be quantitatively described. Furthermore, it is shown how biological function mediated by membranes is controlled by lipid membrane structure and organization on length scales ranging from the size of the individual molecule, across molecular assemblies of proteins and lipid domains in the range of nanometers, to the size of whole cells. Applications of lipids in nano-technology and biomedicine are also described.

The development of contemporary molecular biology with its growing tendency toward in-depth study of the mechanisms of biological processes, structure, function, and identification of biopolymers requires application of accurate physicochemical methods. Electrophoresis occupies a key position among such methods. A wide range of phenomena fall un­ der the designation of electrophoresis in the literature at the present time. One common characteristic of all such phenomena is transport by an elec­ tric field of a substance whose particles take on a net charge as a result of interaction with the solution.