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DOI: 10.1201/9781003336433-9

9

Emerging Biophysics

Techniques

An Outlook of the Future Landscape of

Biophysics Tools

Anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants.

—​Jacques Monod, 1954 (from Friedmann, 2004)

Everything that is found to be true for E. coli is only sometimes true for other bacteria, let alone

for elephants.

—​Charl Moolman (his PhD viva, Friday, March 13, 2015, TU Delft, the Netherlands)

General Idea: Biophysics is a rapidly evolving discipline, and several emerging tools and

techniques show significant promise for the future. These include systems biophysics, syn­

thetic biology, and bionanotechnology, increasing applications of biophysics to personalizing

healthcare, and biophysics approaches that extend the length scales into the smaller world

quantum phenomena and the larger world of populations of organisms, which we discuss here.

9.1  INTRODUCTION

There are several core biophysical tools and techniques invented in the twentieth and early

twenty-​first centuries, which, although experiencing improvements and adaptations sub­

sequent to their inception, have in their primary features at least stood the test of time.

However, there are several recently emerging methods that, although less established than

the core tools and technologies discussed previously in this book, still offer enormous poten­

tial for generating novel biological insight and/​or having important applications to society.

These emerging tools have largely developed from the crossover of several different scientific

disciplines. For example, aspects of systems biology developed largely from computational

biology themes have now been adapted to include strong physiology elements that encapsu­

late several experimental cellular biophysics tools.

Similarly, synthetic biology and bioengineering methods largely grew from chemical

engineering concepts in the first instance but now apply multiple biophysics approaches.

Developments in diagnostics for healthcare are progressing toward far greater personaliza­

tion, that is, methods that can be catered toward individual patients, which in particular use

biophysics methods.

9.2  SYSTEMS BIOLOGY AND BIOPHYSICS: “SYSTEMS

BIOPHYSICS”

Systems biology as a discipline grew from the efforts of the nineteenth-​century physiologist

Claude Bernard, who developed the founding principles of homeostasis, namely, the phe­

nomenon of an organism’s internal environment being carefully regulated within certain

limits, which optimizes its ultimate viability. Ultimately, this regulation of the physiological

state involves the interaction between multiple systems in an organism, which we now know

can act over multiple different length and time scales.