FYS3715 – Biological Physics

How does a bacterium find food when it swims in a world without inertia? Why does a cell burst in pure water? How can entropy create order instead of disorder? And how do identical cells organize themselves into a tissue with a shape? In this course you use statistical physics, soft matter and mechanics to build quantitative models of living systems on scales from 1 nm to a few hundred micrometres, and you test the models against your own measurements and simulations.

The course is centred on projects such as passive random walkers and active matter, morphogenesis, mechanobiology and the action potential in nerve cells. You work as a researcher throughout the semester: you carry out your own microscopy experiments, write your own simulations in Python, read original papers — among them Einstein, Langevin, Purcell and Vicsek — and present and document the work in project reports. The course is relevant for you if you want to go on to work in biophysics, soft matter, biomechanics, systems biology or quantitative life science.

After completing the course, you will be able to:

• explain how thermal motion, entropy, free energy, and entropic forces set the limits for molecular and cellular processes, including self-organization.
• analyze diffusion, Brownian motion, and transport at low Reynolds numbers, and calculate relevant orders of magnitude for biological systems.
• explain how osmosis, ion distribution, and active ion transport determine cell volume and membrane potential, as well as how cells generate, sense, and respond to mechanical forces.
• compare and apply key models of pattern formation, morphogenesis, and collective behavior, including reaction-diffusion, differential adhesion, and active matter.
• conduct and analyze experiments, simulations, and image analyses to extract and interpret quantitative data from biological systems.
• assess assumptions and simplifications in biophysical models, read and critically discuss research literature, and communicate results and scientific reasoning in writing and orally.

• FYS2160 – Thermodynamics and Statistical Physics (necessary prerequisite is given during the 5 first weeks that can be followed in the same semester)

6 hours of organized teaching per week throughout the semester.

The teaching includes lectures, colloquia, problem-solving, teamwork, small and large project assignments, and laboratory exercises.

In this course, there are 4 mandatory project assignments (laboratory and computational assignments) during the semester. All of the mandatory assignments must be completed and approved before you can sit the final exam.

See rules for mandatory activities.

As the teaching involves laboratory and/or field work, you should consider taking out a separate travel and personal risk insurance. Read about your insurance cover as a student.

• Final oral exam which counts 100 % towards the final grade.

This course has mandatory exercises that must be approved before you can sit the final exam.

It will also be counted as one of the three attempts to sit the exam for this course, if you sit the exam for one of the following courses:FYS4715 – Biological Physics and FYS9715 – Biological Physics

Students who can document a valid reason for absence from the regular examination are offered a postponed examination at the beginning of the next semester.

Re-scheduled examinations are not offered to students who withdraw during, or did not pass, the original examination.