Physical Biology of the Cell

Rob Phillips is the Fred and Nancy Morris Professor of Biophysics and Biology at the California Institute of Technology. He received a PhD in Physics from Washington University in St. Louis. Jane Kondev is a Professor of Physics in the Graduate Program in Quantitative Biology at Brandeis University. He received his Physics BS degree from the University of Belgrade, and his PhD from Cornell University. Julie Theriot is a Professor of Biochemistry and of Microbiology and Immunology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She received concurrent BS degrees in Physics and Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a PhD in Cell Biology from the University of California at San Francisco. Hernan G. Garcia is an Associate Research Fellow at Princeton University. He received a BS in Physics from the University of Buenos Aires and a PhD in Physics from the California Institute of Technology.

Part I: The Facts of Life


1. Why: Biology by the Numbers
2. What and Where
3. When: Stopwatches at Many Scales
4. Who: "Bless the Little Beasties"


Part II: Life at Rest


5. Mechanical and Chemical Equilibrium
6. Entropy Rules!
7. Two-State Systems
8. Random Walks and the Structure of Macromolecules
9. Electrostatics for Salty Solutions
10. Beam Theory
11. Biological Membranes


Part III: Life in Motion


12. The Mathematics of Water
13. A Statistical View of Biological Dynamics
14. Crowded and Disordered Environments
15. Rate Equations and Dynamics in the Cell
16. Dynamics of Molecular Motors
17. Biological Electricity
18. Light and Life - NEW CHAPTER


Part IV: The Meaning of Life


19. Organization of Biological Networks
20. Biological Patterns: Order in Space and Time - NEW CHAPTER
21. Sequences, Specificity, and Evolution
22. Whither Physical Biology?