Department of Engineering

The interior of living cells is a strange environment - very different to anything usually considered by physical chemists. Molecules are present in slurry rather than in solution and there is a great deal of organisation and inhomogeneity. Macromolecules are densely packed together and their chemical reactions are strongly influenced by their location in the cell. Changes in protein conformation propagate through the cell and may produce localised sol-gel transitions and mechanical effects. Many cell events are driven by numbers of molecules small enough that the thermal fluctuations in reaction rates become significant. In order to understand and make predictions about events in this strange domain we believe we must take quantitative data at many different scales, obtained by biological, chemical and physical techniques, and integrate them into detailed computer models.

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