Workshop on the Physics of Living Matter (PhysLM2023)

Title

Workshop on the Physics of Living Matter (PhysLM2023)

Time and Location

March 31—April 3rd, 2023, GTIIT Auditorium

Host

Prof. Xinpeng XU (GTIIT, physics)

Introduction

This workshop will bring together soft matter scientists mostly in China who are interested in exploring and applying the basic physical principles that underlie the behaviors of ‘living matter’, ’living systems’, or simply ‘life’. The question ‘What is life?’ is an old, yet constantly new question, perhaps an eternal question. In 1944, Erwin Schrödinger asked this question in his well-known book that changed the course of modern biology. Schrödinger’s lecture focused on one important question: “how can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?” It’s a sentiment that has lured generations of physical scientists to biology. For the past half-century, researchers have applied the rigorous tools of physics to help answer Schrödinger’s question and uncover the fundamental mechanisms of life. A series of Nobel prizes attests to their success: Francis Crick, James Watson and double helical DNA; Max Perutz and myoglobin; Hartmut Michel and photosynthetic reaction centers, Peter Agre and water channels – the list goes on. These successes have been widely acknowledged and respected in biology, particularly in structural biology, and the research field is usually known as ‘biophysics’. However, some of the most exciting challenges in biology remain and have not been touched in traditional ‘biophysics’. Physical insight into the mechanics and statistics of living matter, from molecules to cells to tissues, remains far behind our understanding of how collections of non-living particles are organized. And indeed, there has been a recent push to drop the term ‘biophysics’ altogether and recast the endeavour as the physics of ‘living matter’.

The central aim of our workshop is to discuss recent advances in the field of active and living matter physics and identify emergent principles that govern the dynamic organization of living matter across scales – from proteins, swimming bacteria, to adherent animal cells, and up to bacterial colonies and animal tissues. We will use this conference as a platform to discuss living matter as a self-organizing and active form of soft condensed matter. This approach has been recently shown to be revealing original and new physics and establishing a new perspective on dynamic biological processes as self-organizing dynamical systems. We have selected a synergistic group of speakers from physics, chemistry, and biology. Our sessions will be dedicated to the following three topics:

• Active Matter (mostly bacteria) 
• Animal Cell and Tissue
• Phase Separation in Biology

Please click Workshop Agenda for more details.