Zwicker Group

That’s a super cool story!

Our institute turned 100 years today! We had a fantastic celebration with scientific talks by Howard Stone and Christina Marchetti. 🎉

This workshop was just exceptional! Thanks to everyone for making it such a success

Took us until the end of Week 5 to take a group picture 🤦‍♀️, so we're missing a number of key participants. But what a wonderful group of thoughtful and creative people to talk science with! Thanks for joining us at #KITP! 🤓

Glad to see our paper out in press! The long delay to publication emphasizes the role of pre-prints, and I'm happy that people were able to read about our ideas years before they appear in a journal.

It's sad that our conference on biomolecular condensates is already over. On the flip side, you can watch almost all talks online to relive the stimulating vibe! Thanks again to all speakers for delivering clear talks, and to the audience for asking great questions!

Our conference bringing together theorists and experimentalists to discuss biomolecular condensates started today! Looking forward to three intensive days of stimulating discussion.

@jerelleaj.bsky.social, master painter 👩🏽‍🎨 of the blackboard 👩🏽‍🏫, in action! 🤩 She is amazing at capturing the essence of our complex, meandering (and sometimes contentious) discussions @kitp-ucsb.bsky.social

This was an excellent blackboard presentation of the physics of condensates!

Shura Grosberg (NYU) gives a fantastic blackboard talk @kitp-ucsb.bsky.social on liquid-liquid phase separation in and out of equilibrium 👨‍🏫

It’s been a lot of fun talking about chemically active condensates to such an attentive and motivated crowd!

We show that such multistability becomes more likely with increasing component count since the homogeneous state tends to be more stable whereas the equilibrium state gains more phases on average. This also suggests that generic multicomponent mixtures have a huge nucelation-and-growth regime!

We updated our pre-print on equilibria in multicomponent mixtures: arxiv.org/abs/2405.01138 In particular, we added the figure below, which shows that such mixtures exhibit countless metastable states between a metastable homogeneous state and the equilibrium with many phases.

Active transport enables protein condensation in cells The force generated by active transport modulates protein condensation.

Biomolecular condensates are critical for organizing cellular contents, but most studies focus on phase separation driven by salt, pH, or temperature.
But what if intracellular movement also matters?
Here, we explore motility-induced condensation in the cell.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I agree completely! I just think that it is often more helpful to ask quantitative questions (e.g., how much agency can we attribute to cells) as compared to qualitative question (do cells exhibit agency). By extension, this then also applies to thinking about the validity of metaphors.

Is there even a clear distinction between „metaphor“ and „not a metaphor“? Can one not think of this as a continuum? In case of agency, cells would be in a region where the distinction indeed becomes blurry, but that’s exactly the exciting thing!

Totally agree - the worst are „outlines“ that simply state that the speaker will start with an introduction, then talk about the main results, and finishes with a summary. Similarly useless are slides that simply state „Thank you“ at the end of a talk - leave the summary slide instead!

We are so looking forward to the discussions (at the beach?) in Santa Barbara!

It’s a great conference - enjoy the discussions!

We were so annoyed with `imshow` for creating density plots that we wrote a whole `densityplot` module to produce density plots conveniently (including log-scaled axes!). Our package is available on pypi (as part of the `utilitiez` package) and on GitHub: github.com/zwicker-grou...

We might say the same thing, though :) A good introduction in my mind includes goals and gives the audience a map to follow. Details should then be filled in later. Maybe it’s just semantics that are difficult to discuss online….

Are you saying that the presenter should not tell the audience about the rough plan for the presentation? I might misunderstand your point, but I strongly believe the presenter should tell the audience about their goal and the way toward it. Without such a map, the audience might get lost…

It was indeed a great conference with surprisingly diverse topics. The interactive discussion rounds were particularly stimulating! Congratulations to the organizers for making such a stimulating conference possible 🎉

The four days of "Theory and concepts in biology" finish with a round table discussion on biology's biggest challenges. Some common themes emerged: how to deal with biological complexity? How to understand levels of organization? Which features make life unique? #EESTCBio @events.embl.org

It was a great conference with such diverse topics. The interactive discussion rounds were particularly stimulating! Congratulations to the organizers for making such a stimulating conference possible 🎉

Looking forward to an exciting meeting on "Theory and Concepts in Biology" at EMBL this week! #EESTCBio

Join our interdisciplinary team developing computational approaches to understand and engineer biomolecular condensates. We’re looking for a postdoc—please apply or share with interested persons! 👩🏽‍💻💧🧬
puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

Digital flyer for the lecture, including that it will take place on Wednesday, May 7th at 3 pm Central European Time

Next week, it is time for another Matter to Life lecture! MtL Fellow Andreas Janshoff from the University of Göttingen will speak about “The role of polarity in tissue mechanics”. Register here: us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Robust circadian clocks from coupled protein-modification and transcription–translation cycles | PNAS The cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus uses both a protein phosphorylation cycle and a transcription–translation cycle to generate circadian rh...

We looked at a related effect of growth/dilution on circadian rhythms in this theoretical paper: dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

The O'Shea lab later confirmed a critical influence of growth rates in experiments: dx.doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Yong Han Phee joined our group today! He's a #mattertolife student and will do an internship for this semester. Welcome aboard 🎉