This course hopefully will help us to figure out how much physics is involving on the life, among them thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, low Reynold's number hydrodynamics, phase transition,  molecular motors, and charged systems. The text book is a very interesting book which also serves to introduce much of the conceptual material underlying the young fields of nanotechnology and soft materials. Definitely, I am not going to teach Biology in this course, as I don’t know that myself! This is very much a physics course, and will emphasize the quantitative aspects of biological phenomena. I strongly recommend all students to read this and this before taking the course.

Some homework problems require some computational work. A basic knowledge of computing (Mathematica or MATLAB) would likely come in handy.

Even though I will briefly review some thermodynamics concepts, basic knowledge of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics are necessary.

Have a look at the  table of Contents
 

I strongly recommend you to read new book of Physical Biology of the cell by Phillips/Kondev/Theriot

Marking:

Homework and Quizzes	20%
Midterm	30%
Final Exam	50%
Bonus problems	10%

 

Useful links:

• The free encyclopedia of Wikipedia.
• RasMol (a free pdb viewer) is available here.
• pdb files for proteins available at the Protein Database.
• pdb files for nucleic acids are available at the Nucleic Acid Database.
• Some educational resources are listed here and also here.
• A rich selection of web resources for computational biology.

Lecture 1:

• Some basic concepts of thermodynamics
• Home work: Problems of the chapter 1 of the text book
• Stand on the shoulders of giants
  • Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790)
  • Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753 – 1814)

Lecture 2:

• Some terminology and overview on biological systems
• Cell (structure and function)
• Cell division movie can be download from this site.
• The movie of the neutrophil chasing a bacterium can be found here.
• This site help you to imagine protein structure.

Lecture 3:

• Structural objects inside cell
• Genetics and heredity
• Some basic educational resources are available here.
• A very interesting documentary introduction on Human evolution.
• The future course of evolutionary theory is reviewed here.
• Home works: Do yourself problems of chapter 2.

Lecture 4:

• Some introduction about probability density function
• Moments and cumulants
• Central limit theorem
• Velocity distribution of gas molecules

Lecture 5:

• An excursion on genetic and heredity
• Home works: chapter 3
• Stand on the shoulders of giants
  • Charles Robert Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882)
  • Gregor Johann Mendel (July 20[1], 1822 – January 6, 1884)
  • Thomas Hunt Morgan (September 25, 1866 – December 4, 1945)
  • Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger (August 12, 1887 – January 4, 1961)
  • Max Delbrück (September 4, 1906 – March 9, 1981)