Soft Matter Seminar: “Energetic Costs of Biological Assembly and Function”

The Syracuse University Department of Physics is pleased to welcome Michael Murrell, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Yale University for his talk, “Energetic costs of biological assembly and function.”

Living systems operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium and thus resist definition by the laws of equilibrium thermodynamics. Therefore, the energetic rules that govern biological assembly, the evolution of complex structure and form and the processes that promote life are unknown. In this seminar, we will discuss research into engineering life-like structures and behaviors from basic components. We will discuss novel methodologies for orchestrating protein-protein interactions that build complex macromolecules de novo while measuring the energy consumed in the process. In doing so, we can develop an energy ‘landscape’ that describes the energetic costs of organization, complexity and behavior. With this information, we can revisit long-standing hypotheses on the energetic requirements for life and identify potential strategies for engineering materials with life-like capabilities.