Multiscale Modeling and Analysis in Biophysics

Biochemistry, molecular biology, and structural biology uncover increasingly detailed parts of living systems. Bioinformatics allows scientists to annotate and integrate these data, giving rise to systems biology, which seeks to reconstruct networks of molecular interactions behind emergent biophysical functions of different cell types. Biological systems depend critically on their dynamic three-dimensional organization to achieve robust physiological functions. Building tools and analyses that integrate structurally across physical scales—from molecule all the way to organism—is a defining problem of modern biophysics. The need for multiscale modeling and analysis is apparent in medicine. Patients' symptoms manifest at the tissue, organ, and body scales. Still, medical therapies target specific molecules or operate on single organs without integrating critical cell–cell, cell–tissue, and cell–organ couplings. This Special Topic seeks to better understand these multiscale relationships in order to better inform medical science.

Guest Editors: Alessio Gizzi, Andrew McCulloch, and Corina Drapaca