Physicists have developed a dynamical model of animal behavior that may explain some mysteries surrounding associative learning going back to Pavlov’s dogs. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published the findings, based on experiments on a common laboratory organism, the roundworm C. elegans.  “We showed how learned associations are not mediated by just … More As the worm turns: New twists in behavioral association theories

Assistant professor Daniel Weissman has received an NSF CAREER grant to study how pathogens evolve. Dr. Weissman’s group will use dynamical data from the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic to infer how viral mutations interact and will use sequencing data from the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus to determine how gene exchange among different strains of bacteria drives their adaptation. … More Daniel Weissman earns NSF CAREER award to study pathogen evolution

Ilya Nemenman is one of only two recipients of this year’s Simons Investigators award for Theoretical Physics in Life Sciences, honoring “outstanding theoretical scientists in their most productive years, when they are establishing creative new research directions, providing leadership to the field and effectively mentoring junior scientists.” The appointment is renewable, with an initial period … More Ilya Nemenman honored with Simons Investigators award

BY W.XU, D. DUNLAP, & L. FINZI (Pictured Left to Right: D. Dunlap, W. XU, L. Finzi) Our goal is to review the main theoretical models used to calculate free energy changes associated with common, torsion-induced conformational changes in DNA and provide the resulting equations hoping to facilitate quantitative analysis of both in vitro and … More Spotlight on “Energetics of twisted DNA topologies”

Journalists from The Scientist (www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/some-viruses-use-an-alternative-genetic-alphabet-68726) and Nature (www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01157-x) recently interviewed David Dunlap, PhD,. He was asked to comment on recent discoveries reported in three articles published in Scie nce on April 29, 2021 of 60 organisms whose genome contains diaminopurine (DAP) instead of adenine and enzymes responsible for incorporating DAP into DNA. For over forty … More The Scientist and Nature recently interviewed David Dunlap…

The dynamics of the neural activity of a mouse brain behave in a peculiar, unexpected way that can be theoretically modeled without any fine tuning, suggests a new paper by physicists at Emory University. Physical Review Letters published the research, which adds to the evidence that theoretical physics frameworks may aid in the understanding of … More Physicists develop theoretical model for neural activity of mouse brain

Kim group shows that power law tail in replication lag time underlies bacterial persistence Persisters are antibiotic-tolerant cells that can evade antibiotic killing by ceasing replication.  They complicate antibiotic treatment, leading to treatment failure. Professor Minsu Kim and graduate student (now Ph.D.) Emrah Simsek quantitatively analyzed the non-replication periods of the persisters, and show that … More Kim group shows how power law tail in replication lag time underlies bacterial persistence