Physical Biology of the Cell

Rob Phillips is in the Department of Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He received a PhD in physics from Washington University in St. Louis. Jane Kondev is in the Department of Physics and the Graduate Program in Quantitative Biology at Brandeis University. He attended the Mathematical High School in Belgrade, Serbia, received his Physics BS degree from the University of Belgrade, and his PhD from Cornell University. Julie Theriot is in the Department of Biochemistry and the Department 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.

Part I The Facts of Life
1. Why: Biology By the Numbers
2. What and Where: Construction Plans for Cells and Organisms
3. When: Stopwatches at Many Scales
4. Who: "Bless the Little Beasties"

Part II Life at Rest
5. Mechanical and Chemical Equilibrium in the Living Cell
6. Entropy Rules!
7. Two-State Systems: From Ion Channels to Cooperative Binding
8. Random Walks and the Structure of Macromolecules
9. Electrostatics for Salty Solutions
10. Beam Theory: Architecture for Cells and Skeletons
11. Biological Membranes: Life in Two Dimensions

Part III Life in Motion
12. The Mathematics of Water
13. A Statistical View of Biological Dynamics
14. Life in Crowded and Disordered Environments
15. Rate Equations and Dynamics in the Cell
16. Dynamics of Molecular Motors
17. Biological Electricity and the Hodgkin-Huxley Model

Part IV The Meaning of Life
18. Sequences, Specificity and Evolution
19. Network Organization in Space and Time
20. Whither Physical Biology