What are the major contributions of biophysics to modern biology?
Answers
Answer:
Biophysics has been critical to understanding the mechanics of how the molecules of life are made, how different parts of a cell move and function, and how complex systems in our bodies—the brain, circulation, immune system, and others— work.
Explanation:
Answer:
An important contribution of biophysicists to modern biology is the perspective that biological processes can be understood from the interactions between and within the constituent molecules. Therefore, the behaviors of biological systems can be predicted from physical principles.
A biological problem that has been mostly tackled by biophysicists is protein folding, by which a nascent polypeptide chain coming off the ribosome finds its unique structure in its native environment. The broad outlines of how the protein avoids the vast number of alternative conformations and quickly finds its native structure are now clear. Some may go as far as claiming the problem is solved. Biophysicists are now using very similar approaches to study the binding of proteins and other biomolecules as well as more complex biological processes.
Biophysicists are largely responsible for dramatic increases in the spatial resolution of structural characterization and the temporal resolution of dynamical characterization, and for bringing the study of biological processes to the single-molecule level.
Biophysicists have demonstrated that many essential features of complex biological systems can be emulated by relatively simple computational models. In particular, artificial neural networks are shown to produce associative memory, an essential function of the brain.