The following are links to biophysics-related videos and
images that various biophysics faculty and students have
recommended as interesting.
Biophysics videos
The
video The
Inner Life of a Cell is full of interesting examples of
biophysics at the cellular and subcellular level:
self-assembly of microtubules, kinesin motors that transport
vesicles along microtubule railways, transcription of DNA
followed by translation into proteins (how are errors
avoided?), diffusion of intramembrane proteins in a liquid
lipid bilayer, and so on. Most of what is shown in this
movie is poorly understood, there is lots for an
undergraduate to investigate!
Powering
the Cell: Mitochondria, visualization of ATP production
inside a mitochondrion by same people
(Biovisions)
who made
the The
Inner Life of a Cell. Note the similarity between the
rotating ATP-synthase molecules (which converts ADP
to ATP) to flagellar motors.
Movie
of growing yeast cells
from Professor
Buchler's lab. Here a fluorescent protein has been fused
to a target gene in a living cell and then time-lapse
fluorescence microscopy was used to quantitatively measure
the gene dynamics, such as bistability and oscillation.
Videos
from the Firtel lab of
the slime
mold dictyosteliuim discoideum undergoing various
collective dynamics such as aggregation. Dictyostelium is
being intensely studied by biologists, physicists, and other
scientists since it provides a simple example of cell
differentiation followed by self-assembly into a
multicellular structure as a response to environmental
conditions.
More videos of dictyostelium pattern formation can
be found at
this site.
Howard Berg's research group has
a fascinating
collection of videos showing various single-cell animals
moving about in different ways.