Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that applies approaches and methods traditionally used in physics to study biological phenomena. Biophysics covers all scales of biological organization, from molecular to organismic and populations. Biophysical research shares significant overlap with biochemistry, molecular biology, physical chemistry, physiology, nanotechnology, bioengineering, computational biology, biomechanics, developmental biology and systems biology.
Roderick MacKinnon is an American biophysicist, neuroscientist, and businessman. He is a professor of molecular neurobiology and biophysics at Rockefeller University who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Peter Agre in 2003 for his work on the structure and operation of ion channels.
SOLEIL is a synchrotron facility near Paris, France. It performed its first acceleration of electrons on May 14, 2006. The name SOLEIL is a backronym for Source optimisée de lumière d’énergie intermédiaire du LURE, LURE meaning Laboratoire pour l'utilisation du rayonnement électromagnétique.
Padmanabhan Balaram is an Indian biochemist and a former director of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India. He is a recipient of the third highest Indian civilian honour of Padma Bhushan (2014) as well as the TWAS Prize (1994). He has been conferred the 2021 R. Bruce Merrifield Award by the American Peptide Society.
The Max Planck Institute of Biophysics is located in Frankfurt, Germany. It was founded as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Biophysics in 1937, and moved into a new building in 2003. It is an institute of the Max Planck Society.
Richard Henderson is a British molecular biologist and biophysicist and pioneer in the field of electron microscopy of biological molecules. Henderson shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017 with Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank. "Thanks to his work, we can look at individual atoms of living nature, thanks to cryo-electron microscopes we can see details without destroying samples, and for this he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry."
Molecular biophysics is a rapidly evolving interdisciplinary area of research that combines concepts in physics, chemistry, engineering, mathematics and biology. It seeks to understand biomolecular systems and explain biological function in terms of molecular structure, structural organization, and dynamic behaviour at various levels of complexity. This discipline covers topics such as the measurement of molecular forces, molecular associations, allosteric interactions, Brownian motion, and cable theory. Additional areas of study can be found on Outline of Biophysics. The discipline has required development of specialized equipment and procedures capable of imaging and manipulating minute living structures, as well as novel experimental approaches.
Dame Janet Maureen Thornton, is a senior scientist and director emeritus at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). She is one of the world's leading researchers in structural bioinformatics, using computational methods to understand protein structure and function. She served as director of the EBI from October 2001 to June 2015, and played a key role in ELIXIR.
Bengt Johan Fredrik Nordén is a Swedish chemist.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to biophysics:
Sheena Elizabeth Radford is a British biophysicist, and Astbury Professor of Biophysics and a Royal Society Research Professor in the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology, School of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Leeds. Radford is the Associate Editor of the Journal of Molecular Biology.
Frances Separovic is an Australian biophysical chemist. She is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of Melbourne, where she taught physical chemistry and trained graduate students in her field. She is credited with developing techniques that utilise nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) to study peptides in lipid bilayers, with applications in the study of the structure of membrane proteins and their effects on membranes. Her more recent research concerns 'the structure and interactions of amyloid peptides from Alzheimer's disease, pore-forming toxins and antibiotic peptides in model biological membranes'.
Helen Jane Dyson is a British-born biophysicist and a professor of integrative structural and computational biology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. She was the 15th editor-in-chief of the Biophysical Journal. She was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Alison Rodger is a Scottish-Australian chemist who is a professor of chemistry at the Australian National University. Her research considers biomacromolecular structures and their characterisation. She is currently developing fluorescence detected liner dichroism, Raman Linear Difference Spectroscopy and attenuated total reflectance Vibrational linear dichroism to understand biomacromolecular structure and interactions with application to the division of bacterial cells.
Robert Michael Stroud is a British biophysicist best known for his contributions to structural biology as means of determining the function of proteins, enzymes and integral membrane proteins. He was a professor of Chemistry at Caltech in the early 1970s and professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics, and of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California in San Francisco since 1976. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003.
John R. Helliwell is a British crystallographer known for his pioneering work in the use of synchrotron radiation in macromolecular crystallography.
Synchrotron radiation circular dichroism spectroscopy, commonly referred to as SRCD and also known as VUV-circular dichroism or VUVCD spectroscopy, is a powerful extension to the technique of circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy, often used to study structural properties of biological molecules such as proteins and nucleic acids. The physical principles of SRCD are essentially identical to those of CD, in that the technique measures the difference in absorption (ΔA) of left (AL) and right (AR) circularly polarized light (ΔA=AL-AR) by a sample in solution. To obtain a CD(SRCD) spectrum the sample must be innately optically active (chiral), or, in some way be induced to have chiral properties, as only then will there be an observable difference in absorption of the left and right circularly polarized light. The major advantages of SRCD over CD arise from the ability to measure data over an extended wavelength range into the vacuum ultra violet (VUV) end of the spectrum. As these measurements are utilizing a light source with a higher photon flux than a bench-top CD machine it means data are more accurate at these extended wavelengths because there is a larger signal over the background noise and, generally, less sample is needed when recording the spectra and there is more information content available in the data. Many beamlines now exist around the world to enable the measurement of SRCD data.
Janos Hajdu is a Swedish/Hungarian scientist, who has made contributions to biochemistry, biophysics, and the science of X-ray free-electron lasers. He is a professor of molecular biophysics at Uppsala University and a leading scientist at the European Extreme Light Infrastructure ERIC in Prague.
Jürgen Engel is a German-born Swiss chemist and biophysicist.
