You are cordially invited to the IPB COLLOQUIUM which will be held on Monday, 23 October 2023 at 12:00 in the “Zvonko Marić” lecture hall of the Institute of Physics Belgrade. The talk entitled

Emergence of size in living cells

will be given by Prof. Dr. Jane Kondev (Martin A. Fisher School of Physics, Brandeis University, USA). The abstract of the talk:

The emergence of macroscopic phenomena from the interactions of its microscopic components has been the focus of condensed matter physics for many decades. Successes include our understanding of phase transitions, while turbulence still remains mostly mysterious. To what extent do these lessons from physics apply to biology is an open question.

In cell biology, for more than a hundred years it has been observed that micron-sized internal structures (organelles) within the cell self-assemble from nanometer-sized proteins to a well defined size. In this talk we will describe our experiments on yeast cells and related theoretical work that seeks to uncover the general principles of organelle size as an emergent phenomenon in cell biology.