Biological physics in México

Abstract

Biological and physical sciences possess a long-standing tradition of cooperativity as separate but related subfields of science. For some time, this cooperativity has been limited by their obvious differences in methods and views. Biological physics has recently experienced a kind of revival (or better a rebirth) due to the growth of molecular research on animate matter. New avenues for research have been opened for both theoretical and experimental physicists. Nevertheless, in order to better travel for such paths, the contemporary biological physicist should be armed with a set of specialized tools and methods but also with a new attitude toward multidisciplinarity. In this review article, we intend to somehow summarize what has been done in the past (in particular, as an example we will take a closer look at the Mexican case), to show some examples of fruitful investigations in the biological physics area and also to set a proposal of new curricula for physics students and professionals interested in applying their science to get a better understanding of the physical basis of biological function.

Data integration, systems approach and multilevel description of complex biosystems

“…The role that such disciplines have acquired in the biological sciences is growing in importance [24], as is evident, in numerous research efforts in biology (see for instance reference [25]) and in the creation of the Office of Physical Sciences Oncology in the National Cancer Institutes in the U.S. [26] among a myriad other projects involving methods of statistical physics on one side and biology on the other. This mini-review presents the application of some of these ideas in our own research, namely in the case of data integration in cancer 'omics [1], system's biology approach to the metabolic-transcriptional coupling in breast cancer [6,7], high throughput data management and compression in computational biology [20] and multidimensional correlation analysis in computational neuroscience [22].…”

Sobre la difusión en sistemas confinados: una aproximación al estudio de la difusión en canales

“…Cabe señalar que en México la física biológica se cultiva asiduamente y las referencias [214,215] reunen un amplio espectro de los temas que se desarrollan en diversas instituciones de nuestro país. Asimismo, una revisión crítica del panorama de esta rama de la ciencia en México se halla en [216,217].…”