Physical Principles in Sensing and Signaling: With an Introduction to Modeling in Biology

Although invisible to the bare eye, bacterial cells are large enough to make complex decisions. Cells are composed of thousands of different molecular species including DNA, proteins, and smaller molecules, allowing them to sense their environment, to process this information, and to respond accordingly. Such responses include expression of genes or the control of their movement. Despite these properties, a living cell exists in the physical world and follows its laws. Keeping this in mind can help answer questions such as how cells work and why they implement solutions to problems the way they do. Applying physical principles in biology allows researchers to solve challenging problems at the interface between biology and the physical sciences, including how accurately biological cells can sense chemicals in their environment, how cells encode physical stimuli in biochemical pathways, or how cells amplify signals and adapt to persistent stimulation. In this book, the reader is
introduced to this fascinating topic without the need for extensive mathematical details or huge prior knowledge in biological physics.

雖然對於肉眼來說是看不見的，但細菌細胞足夠大以做出複雜的決策。細胞由數千種不同的分子組成，包括DNA、蛋白質和較小的分子，使它們能夠感知環境、處理這些信息並做出相應的反應。這些反應包括基因的表達或對其運動的控制。儘管具有這些特性，活細胞存在於物理世界中並遵循其規律。謹記這一點可以幫助回答細胞如何工作以及為什麼它們以特定方式解決問題的問題。在生物學中應用物理原理可以幫助研究人員解決生物學和物理科學之間的界面上的具有挑戰性的問題，包括生物細胞在其環境中準確感知化學物質的能力、細胞如何將物理刺激編碼成生化途徑、以及細胞如何放大信號並適應持續刺激。在本書中，讀者將介紹這個迷人的主題，而無需過多的數學細節或在生物物理學方面的龐大先備知識。

At Imperial College Robert Endres heads the Biological Physics Group. Recently he won the prestigious ERC Strating Grant award. Before moving to the United Kingdom, Robert was a postdoc with Prof. Ned Wingreen in the Molecular Biology Department at Princeton University, where his main research accomplishments were the understanding of the remarkable signalling properties of bacterial chemotaxis and the atomistic prediction of protein-DNA binding sites.

在帝國學院，羅伯特·恩德雷斯（Robert Endres）領導著生物物理學小組。最近，他獲得了享有盛譽的ERC Strating Grant獎項。在移居英國之前，羅伯特在普林斯頓大學分子生物學系的Ned Wingreen教授指導下擔任博士後研究員，他的主要研究成果包括對細菌趋化作用的顯著信號特性的理解以及蛋白質-DNA結合位點的原子級預測。