Biology has many examples of Nature's amazing engineering marvels and astoundingly intriguing physical phenomena. 

Every biological structure and its associated function is carefully orchestrated by working together of millions of dynamically interacting single molecules. These non-covalent interactions are very tiny (~ few pN) and very accurate (well you and I are made out of them).

For a spell bounding artistic visual of biophysics in action, look below:

To understand the mechanisms that govern biological function we, as physicist and engineers, build state-of-the-art tools with which we can hold single DNA and protein molecules and measure their interaction forces and watch their dynamics in real time.

With these "hands" and "eyes" techniques we probe various molecular aspects of a biological cell and in order to understand "How does molecular machinery inside a cell performs its function ? ". 

In our lab, we will address a small yet very significant aspect of chromatin biology. Chromatin, a brilliant feat of biology to engineer packaging of DNA inside a eukaryotic cell nucleus while keeping the DNA dynamically accessible for information read out necessary for cell function.

We are interested in exploring various facets of chromatin biology by fabricating nano-devices to probe their physical characteristics. These biosensors, have come up in last 5-8 years, provide unprecedented resolution for biomolecular detection. Hence, not only for fundamental biophysical questions, they are ideal for developing small-sample volume devices for biosensing applications in disease and therapeutic diagnostics. 

This research requires developing skill set in a variety of fields, from physics, optics, chemistry and surface chemistry, cleanroom based nano fabrication, computer programming, modelling & interfacing, ultra-low-noise electronics, optical microscopy, theoretical modeling, molecular biology, microfluidics, DNA and protein engineering, cell biology, single molecule detection using nanopore platform, single molecule force measurements using Laser Optical Tweezers and Atomic Force Microscope as well as molecular visualization using different fluorescence methods. 

If the field excites you to join our lab, we are looking for talented and hardworking students at various positions (click Open Positions). 

Further reading:

If you are further interested, please go through the following references for a little formal view of the field:

Introductory Papers

1. Life at low Reynolds number

2. The “Single Molecule” Paradigm

3. 10 years on tension - Single Molecule DNA mechanics

4. Physics of Chromatin

5. The Potential and challenges of Nanopore Sequencing  

6. A feeling for the numbers in biology

Nanopores

1. Nanopores Review (Wanunu 2012)

2. Nanopores Review (Albrecht 2019) 

3. Salt Dependent translocation of ions and DNA through Nanopore

4. Synchronous optical and electrical detection of biomolecules in nanopores.

5. Direct Force measurement of DNA in nanopore

Cell Biomechanics

1. Cell and molecular mechanics of biological materials

2. Dissecting the Physical Responses of Cells to Force

3. Extracting Cell Stiffness from Real-Time Deformability Cytometry- Theory and Experiment

4. Cellular and Nuclear Forces: An Overview

LOT - Laser Optical Tweezers

1. Probing force in living cells with optical tweezers

2. Blood cell research by optical tweezers

3. Optical tweezers for single Cells

4. Single particle tracking of correlated bacterial dynamics using LOT

AFM - Atomic Force Microscope

1. AFM based Mechanobiology