Colloidal hydrodynamics of the bacterial nucleoid and its impact on diffusion and spatial organization in the cytoplasm

Abstract

Computational modeling of the intracellular milieu as a suspension of colloidal macromolecules provides a complementary framework for studying biological cells by providing access to an expanded range of length- and timescales. Colloidal-scale physics bridge the gap between structural biology, which gives atomistic detail but little time evolution, and systems biology, which models whole-cell time scales but abstracts away spatial effects entirely. Modeling at this colloidal scale led to recent discovery that physical transport regulates some intracellular processes, such as translation elongation in E.