Analysis of nearly 200 human gut microbiome datasets shows that microbial coexistence is governed by a few effective ecological dimensions, rather than the high-dimensional niches assumed by prevailing theory.

[PRX Life 4, 033026] Published Tue Sep 15, 2026

An information-theoretic model shows that, under limited molecular resources, information transmission is maximized by distributing expression across many noisy target genes.

[PRX Life 4, 033025] Published Tue Sep 08, 2026

A fundamental tradeoff between metabolic controllability and thermodynamic cost explains how environmental complexity shapes the evolution of cellular currency-metabolite pools.

[PRX Life 4, 033024] Published Thu Sep 03, 2026

Physical confinement acts as a control parameter that optimizes protein-free homologous DNA pairing by balancing rapid diffusion-limited search with the avoidance of kinetic trapping.

[PRX Life 4, 033023] Published Wed Sep 02, 2026

By mimicking biological brain noise, this work shows that activity-dependent fluctuations drive the emergence of modular architectures in artificial neural networks, improving robustness and generalization.

[PRX Life 4, 033022] Published Tue Sep 01, 2026

Increasing the connectivity of a small fraction of components bypasses kinetic bottlenecks, explaining how assembly factors accelerate the self-assembly of large protein complexes.

[PRX Life 4, 033021] Published Thu Aug 27, 2026

Motivated by recent experimental observations, a theory combining growth kinetics, diffusion and percolation suggests that negative feedback through monomer depletion explains the coexistence of branched actin networks.

[PRX Life 4, 033020] Published Wed Aug 26, 2026

A stochastic population model suggests why natural selection may favor either immediate or strongly delayed reproduction, while making intermediate waiting times less advantageous.

[PRX Life 4, 033019] Published Tue Aug 25, 2026

An adapted AlphaFold docking model bypasses sequence alignments to predict protein complexes, successfully resolving structures where traditional co-folding methods fail.

[PRX Life 4, 033018] Published Mon Aug 24, 2026

This Roadmap clarifies terminology, core physics, biological roles, and key theoretical, computational, and experimental challenges to guide a coordinated effort toward a predictive understanding and control of biomolecular condensates.

[PRX Life 4, 032501] Published Thu Aug 20, 2026

Species-specific oxygen affinities and consumption rates shape the formation of distinct bacterial layers, guiding the dynamic spatial segregation of multispecies communities near air-water interfaces.

[PRX Life 4, 033017] Published Wed Aug 19, 2026

A computational model reveals how chromatin condensates can create bistable heterochromatin states, linking molecular interactions, diffusing cofactors, 3D genome organization, and epigenetic memory.

[PRX Life 4, 033016] Published Tue Aug 18, 2026

Acoustic trapping offers a contactless way to read the mechanical “fingerprint” of soft biopolymer condensates, revealing how their stiffness shifts with environment.

[PRX Life 4, 033015] Published Mon Aug 17, 2026

An automated, scalable workflow quantifies condensate wetting on flat substrates such as supported lipid membranes, enabling systematic analysis of how changes in composition modulate condensate–surface interactions.

[PRX Life 4, 033014] Published Fri Aug 14, 2026

Rare chromatin mobility transitions uncover lineage-specific nonequilibrium dynamics of chromatin remodeling in acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

[PRX Life 4, 033013] Published Wed Aug 12, 2026

Nonlinear respiratory biomechanics in canaries broaden frequency amplification, mechanically supporting the rapid breathing rates essential for singing.

[PRX Life 4, 033012] Published Thu Aug 06, 2026

Bursts of synchronized activity in ant colonies can be characterized as a phase transition, emerging as a balance between the responsiveness of the colony to the activation of a single ant and its ability to fully deactivate before the next burst.

[PRX Life 4, 033010] Published Wed Aug 05, 2026

Fluidity of multicellular spheroids can be determined and tuned by an effective nuclear packing metric that incorporates both nuclear occupancy and shape.

[PRX Life 4, 033011] Published Wed Aug 05, 2026

Tuning elastic networks for bidirectional allostery improves cooperative binding, while a modified tuning process ensures robustness against thermal fluctuations by raising the crossover temperature.

[PRX Life 4, 033009] Published Fri Jul 31, 2026

Knowledge of the underlying statistical structure of a molecular concentration profile enhances biological sensing precision.

[PRX Life 4, 033008] Published Wed Jul 29, 2026

Raster image correlation spectroscopy offers a nondestructive fluorescence-based method for probing biomolecular condensate properties in situ.

[PRX Life 4, 033007] Published Mon Jul 27, 2026

Attachment and detachment of molecules to and from the internal network of a biomolecular condensate can reshape its material exchange dynamics.

[PRX Life 4, 033006] Published Mon Jul 20, 2026

A new confocal imaging method reveals that protein folding stability inside stress granules in living cells defies expectations from test-tube studies.

[PRX Life 4, 033005] Published Thu Jul 16, 2026

A minimal theory shows how energy-consuming enzymes determine how active membrane domain form, persist, and coarsen.

[PRX Life 4, 033004] Published Tue Jul 14, 2026

Driven by metabolic growth-lag trade-offs, the diversification of clonal yeast into two distinct phenotypes acts as an evolutionary rheostat that maximizes long-term fitness.

[PRX Life 4, 033003] Published Thu Jul 09, 2026

Single-molecule experiments show how specific protein domains utilize mechanical strain to relax twisted DNA, proposing modified steps in the protein’s relaxation cycle.

[PRX Life 4, 033002] Published Mon Jul 06, 2026

A new framework provides a robust, timescale-aware way to interpret empirical interactions in ecological systems, offering practical quantitative guidance for experimental design and predictive ecosystem modeling for physicists and ecologists.

[PRX Life 4, 033001] Published Wed Jul 01, 2026

A quantitative description of budding yeast polarization derived from live cell imaging enables systematic comparison of polarization phenotypes, revealing varying degrees of variation in physical characteristics.

[PRX Life 4, 023033] Published Mon Jun 29, 2026

Nuclear condensates exhibit critical-like capillary behavior and unexpected bending elasticity, enabling their interfacial mechanics to be measured noninvasively in living cells.

[PRX Life 4, 023032] Published Thu Jun 25, 2026

Inhibition dynamics implemented in the Kuramoto model is able to reproduce the coexistence of scale free avalanches and encompassing bursts observed experimentally.

[PRX Life 4, 023031] Published Tue Jun 23, 2026

A simulated cortical network rapidly establishes functional circuitry through autonomous learning from mechanically coupled sensors.

[PRX Life 4, 023030] Published Mon Jun 22, 2026

Using disordered solids as a model, this work demonstrates how cyclic environmental change can produce robust system memory.

[PRX Life 4, 023029] Published Thu Jun 18, 2026

Mapping evolutionary dynamics to Bayesian learning shows that organismal complexity tends to match environmental complexity, but rapid environmental changes may favor simpler forms.

[PRX Life 4, 023028] Published Wed Jun 17, 2026

A slime mold confined by harmful blue light extensively explores the boundaries of the confinement before settling on the optimal escape strategy.

[PRX Life 4, 023026] Published Mon Jun 08, 2026

This work presents an E. coli chemosensory lattice that implements gain through non-equilibrium reactions between neighboring core signaling units rather than allosteric interactions, achieving high gain through time-scale separation.

[PRX Life 4, 023027] Published Mon Jun 08, 2026

Experiments in a unicellular relative of animals validate the predictions of a model which treats organisms as Markovian Bayesian agents that learn from environmental states, providing insights into the link between within-lifetime learning and generational adaptation.

[PRX Life 4, 023025] Published Fri Jun 05, 2026

A stochastic transport model reveals that antibiotic-induced ribosome pausing triggers collective jamming on mRNA, making longer transcripts disproportionately vulnerable.

[PRX Life 4, 023024] Published Wed Jun 03, 2026

The concept of inheritance entropy is introduced and experimentally demonstrated to quantitatively predict the hereditary variations in the proliferative power of stem cell lineages.

[PRX Life 4, 023023] Published Tue Jun 02, 2026

A framework that unifies active gel models of the actomyosin cortex and vertex models of tissues captures a number of seemingly disconnected time-dependent phenomenologies in epithelial monolayers.

[PRX Life 4, 023022] Published Fri May 29, 2026

Atomic force microscopy is used to directly visualize conformational transitions in GM130 Golgi tether proteins, which drive condensate formation.

[PRX Life 4, 023021] Published Thu May 28, 2026

Canalization increases overall stability in gene regulatory networks, but transient states are disproportionately stabilized when compared to attractors that correspond to mature cell types.

[PRX Life 4, 023019] Published Tue May 26, 2026

Experimental measurements of cilia distribution and fluid flow at the surface of reef-building coral uncover the crucial role of ciliary orientation in modulating nutrient transport.

[PRX Life 4, 023020] Published Tue May 26, 2026

While classical measures of spike variability could not distinguish activity across brain areas, a complementary information-theoretic measure revealed structured, stimulus-dependent dynamics in distributed brain circuits.

[PRX Life 4, 023018] Published Fri May 22, 2026

A new analytical framework enables genome-wide evaluation of nucleosome positioning based on DNA elasticity.

[PRX Life 4, 023017] Published Thu May 21, 2026

Multistep reversible biochemical cascades produce a three-regime scaling structure, including apparent negative activation energies, that unifies how biological timing responds to temperature across species and scales.

[PRX Life 4, 023016] Published Tue May 19, 2026

Mobile membrane tethers dynamically alter wetting properties, driving the localization and organization of biomolecular condensates along complex cellular membrane geometries.

[PRX Life 4, 023014] Published Fri May 15, 2026

E. coli integrate environmental history through scale-free memory, performing recurrent, neural-like computation to balance growth and survival in fluctuating nutrient conditions.

[PRX Life 4, 023015] Published Fri May 15, 2026

This Perspective summarizes recent studies on how the humoral immune system learns to target unseen pathogen variants via feedback regulation during a limited number of antigen re-exposures, and outlines key questions at the intersection of statistical physics, machine learning, immunology, and evolutionary biology.

[PRX Life 4, 021001] Published Wed May 13, 2026

Turbulent transport plays an important role in fundamentally transforming odor signals from source to sensor.

[PRX Life 4, 023013] Published Wed May 13, 2026

Fluctuation-driven feedback allows eukaryotic gene silencing to selectively suppress harmful genetic elements, with aberrant transcription reinforcing silencing locally while modulating it globally.

[PRX Life 4, 023011] Published Fri May 08, 2026

This mathematical framework shows how intracellular gene expression transmitted through a chemically communicating and dividing cell population controls tissue development.

[PRX Life 4, 023012] Published Fri May 08, 2026

An agent-based model that incorporates photokinesis, gyrotaxis, and stochastic reorientation helps elucidate the mechanisms by which complex, population-scale diurnal cycles emerge from the swimming behavior of individual aquatic organisms.

[PRX Life 4, 023010] Published Thu Apr 30, 2026

A normalizing-flow framework maps the geometry and curvature of low-dimensional manifolds that harbor neural population activity, going beyond Gaussian and linearity assumptions to reveal nonlinear statistical dependencies among groups of neurons.

[PRX Life 4, 023009] Published Mon Apr 27, 2026

Two conditions subextensive mutual information and compressible interactions make neural population codes learnable from finite data revealing noise correlations as essential for neural coding.

[PRX Life 4, 023008] Published Thu Apr 23, 2026

An enhanced form of mechanical proofreading during dynamic cell-cell contact helps reconcile robust clonal selection with tunable specificity in adaptive immune responses.

[PRX Life 4, 023007] Published Fri Apr 17, 2026

A stochastic synaptic framework links spike timing to memory limits, showing how plasticity, noise, and homeostasis jointly shape learning, forgetting, and enforce a tradeoff between memory lifetime and early memory accuracy.

[PRX Life 4, 023006] Published Mon Apr 13, 2026

A robot collective can assemble and disassemble aggregates by altering local transport behavior, demonstrating that complex coordination can emerge from simple local rules.

[PRX Life 4, 023005] Published Fri Apr 10, 2026

Molecular recognition sites evolve faster when coupled to time-dependent targets through an adaptive ratchet mechanism.

[PRX Life 4, 023004] Published Thu Apr 09, 2026

This review article explores the discoveries about energy injection in cytoskeletal matter and proposes a unifying perspective that highlights how energy injection is itself a state-dependent, regulated process rather than a fixed external bath.

[PRX Life 4, 027001] Published Wed Apr 08, 2026

Employing a minimal but biochemically relevant model of trigger waves, this study obtained an analytic expression for wave ignition thresholds in cell signaling in 1D and numerical solutions in 2D and 3D.

[PRX Life 4, 023003] Published Mon Apr 06, 2026

This study shows that the simultaneous presence of error correction and modularity in biological systems is a typical co-occurrence rather than a coincidence, leading them to deduce a principle of error correction-enhanced evolvability.

[PRX Life 4, 023002] Published Fri Apr 03, 2026

Using zero-crossing analysis, the authors extract diagnostically relevant information from the electric-field molecular fingerprints of human blood samples and, in a clinical study, show that deviations in zero-crossing time gaps are linked to the presence and progression of lung cancer.

[PRX Life 4, 023001] Published Wed Apr 01, 2026

Experiments that examine cytoskeletal mechanics in keratin-deficient cells demonstrate that an intricate relationship between actin and keratin cortices in wild-type cells provides stability under high strain.

[PRX Life 4, 013038] Published Tue Mar 31, 2026

By operating in different thermodynamic modes, hair cell bundles in the inner ear dynamically regulate power exchange with mechanical signals at the smallest biological scales.

[PRX Life 4, 013039] Published Tue Mar 31, 2026

All cell surfaces work together mechanically to control the morphology of fluid-filled lumina enclosed by epithelia during tissue development.

[PRX Life 4, 013037] Published Mon Mar 30, 2026

Inspired by Crick’s molecular memory proposal, this study analyzes a nonequilibrium protein model and identifies molecular automata that can be exploited for computation, including in molecular stopwatches and error-tolerant memory.

[PRX Life 4, 013036] Published Fri Mar 27, 2026

This tutorial for coarse-grained cellular growth modeling provides a hands-on, step-by-step guide for constructing and analyzing different aspects of cellular growth and covers essential concepts, recent literature, and key challenges for the field; ready to cook?

[PRX Life 4, 012001] Published Wed Mar 25, 2026

This quantitative framework can image and track neutrophil and macrophage dynamics in larval zebrafish, enabling a method to assess the motility, behavior, and migration patterns of distinct cell populations, especially in the vicinity of the gut.

[PRX Life 4, 013035] Published Fri Mar 20, 2026

Using a transparent soil mimic and the model bacterium E. coli, this study characterized how soil texture affects bacterial motility across pore scales, finding bacteria shift from run-and-tumble behavior in large pores to frequent trapping in small ones.

[PRX Life 4, 013034] Published Thu Mar 19, 2026

This work introduces an extended coarsening model of chromosomal crossover placement, which provides a coherent explanation of experimental data across mutants by incorporating material exchanges between droplets, the synaptonemal complex, and the nucleoplasm.

[PRX Life 4, 013033] Published Wed Mar 11, 2026

This study analyzes the interplay between mechanical activity, lateral adhesion, and hexatic order by developing a continuum model of epithelial layers — providing insights on the general principles governing pattern formation and stability.

[PRX Life 4, 013032] Published Tue Mar 10, 2026

Using a new method to characterize the mechanical properties and driving forces of microtubules in living cells, this study finds that polyglutamylation increases microtubule stiffness, while tube-like mitochondria have a much lower bending stiffness.

[PRX Life 4, 013031] Published Mon Mar 09, 2026

This study details a data-driven implementation of Fisher’s geometric model — providing an empirically grounded approach for understanding evolutionary dynamics using deep learning methods.

[PRX Life 4, 013030] Published Fri Mar 06, 2026

The proposed theory shows how animals could exploit variability in random stimulus sequences to enhance the reliability of inferences underlying survival-critical tasks.

[PRX Life 4, 013029] Published Thu Mar 05, 2026

This statistical physics framework models peptidomes across species and shows that self and nonself peptides are nearly one and the same, implying that the immune system benefits by targeting antigens close to those represented in the organism’s own proteome.

[PRX Life 4, 013027] Published Wed Mar 04, 2026

By integrating genome editing data with a random forest approach algorithm, scientists uncovered a link between the cleavage efficiency of CRISPR and the R-loop unfolding rate, enhancing the prediction of on- and off-target gene editing efficiencies.

[PRX Life 4, 013028] Published Wed Mar 04, 2026

By analyzing how multicomponent mixtures separate into distinct phases, this framework uncovers two scaling regimes, providing a quantitative way to characterize condensate phase behavior.

[PRX Life 4, 013026] Published Mon Mar 02, 2026

By integrating anisotropic network models that incorporate membrane contact probability with perturbation response scanning, this study simulates conformational changes in mechanosensitive proteins — enabling the examination of various gating mechanisms.

[PRX Life 4, 013025] Published Fri Feb 27, 2026

Reverse-time stochastic dynamics, distinct from the forward-time dynamics widely used in stochastic thermodynamics, is fundamental for understanding the directed, goal-reaching dynamics that are a common feature of many biological processes.

[PRX Life 4, 013024] Published Tue Feb 24, 2026

A recurrent neural network model containing neurons with intrinsic plasticity measures how neuronal excitability varies with plasticity under different synaptic inputs — illuminating how these dynamics influence heterogeneity in neural responses.

[PRX Life 4, 013023] Published Fri Feb 20, 2026

Spontaneous retinal waves may be nature’s way to initialize connections — seeding visual circuit structure before experience.

[PRX Life 4, 013022] Published Wed Feb 18, 2026

A cell-level physical model reveals a critical switch fraction where neurodegenerative disease dynamics transition from slow, spontaneous seeding to rapid, runaway propagation.

[PRX Life 4, 013021] Published Tue Feb 17, 2026

By using temporal light patterns and photo-triggers to create virtual sensory landscapes for cells, the reverse opto-chemical engineering technique can be used to both monitor and remotely control the movement of cells.

[PRX Life 4, 013020] Published Fri Feb 13, 2026

Free energy calculations coupled with experimental data show that the intrinsic opening of big potassium channels is likely an inherent property of the vapor barrier generated by hydrophobic dewetting of the inner pore in the deactivated state.

[PRX Life 4, 013019] Published Tue Feb 10, 2026

Chromatin-mediated coupling between cycles of DNA methylation and demethylation can lead to the emergence of phase-locked domains — regions of locally synchronized turnover activity whose coarsening is arrested by genomic heterogeneity.

[PRX Life 4, 013018] Published Mon Feb 09, 2026

A study of the equilibrium phases of a generalized Lotka-Volterra model characterized by non-Gaussian species abundance distributions demonstrates how sparsity is a key feature for accurately modeling realistic ecological phenomena.

[PRX Life 4, 013017] Published Fri Feb 06, 2026

By studying simple model cortical networks with dendritic calcium spikes, this study shows how dendritic nonlinearities and compartmentalized inputs can interact to shape population activity.

[PRX Life 4, 013016] Published Thu Feb 05, 2026

By examining collective patterning in a tractable model, this study reveals a trade-off between speed and accuracy and identifies counterintuitive properties of collective behavior, for instance optimized strategies do not always maximize information transfer.

[PRX Life 4, 013015] Published Wed Feb 04, 2026

Using planarian gut branching as biological inspiration, this study develops a model that integrates tissue interface growth, morphogen dynamics, and organismal growth to explain how branched organ structures form and scale.

[PRX Life 4, 013014] Published Tue Feb 03, 2026

The co-localization of viral RNA and capsids within a condensate strongly enhances assembly rates, yields, and selectivity — suggesting that viral condensates provide a mechanism to ensure the robust and selective assembly of virions around viral genomes.

[PRX Life 4, 013013] Published Mon Feb 02, 2026

By investigating the growth of vesicles driven by an external reservoir, this study finds that active material exchange can drive a dramatic renormalization of a membrane’s effective mechanical properties and impact the trajectory of vesicle growth.

[PRX Life 4, 013012] Published Fri Jan 30, 2026

In recurrently coupled networks of spiking neuron models, causal spike-timing-dependent plasticity permits assembly learning and allows significant overlap in assembly membership without the risk of post-training fusion and erasure of learned structure.

[PRX Life 4, 013011] Published Tue Jan 27, 2026

By studying elongated cells growing on a nematic elastomer substrate, this study finds that global alignment with the substrate is only achieved above a critical density — suggesting a collective mechanism for sensing substrate anisotropy.

[PRX Life 4, 013010] Published Mon Jan 26, 2026

This review article proposes that Marr’s three levels of analysis — the computational problem, the algorithms used, and their molecular implementation — can be a useful framework for studying developmental processes.

[PRX Life 4, 017001] Published Fri Jan 23, 2026

By analyzing the connection between promoter architecture and the ability to quickly decode transcription factor concentration, this study shows that, in the presence of non-cognate ligands, fast and accurate networks do not need to be optimally selective.

[PRX Life 4, 013009] Published Wed Jan 21, 2026

This study proposes that olfactory systems can adapt to rapidly fluctuating odor backgrounds using a manifold learning mechanism and demonstrates how this mechanism can outperform traditional predictive filtering methods.

[PRX Life 4, 013008] Published Fri Jan 16, 2026

A mesoscopic model of finite-size networks for Poisson neurons with random connectivity, external noise, and disordered mean inputs accurately describes fluctuations and nonlinearities and outperforms prior models that neglected variance in connectivity.

[PRX Life 4, 013007] Published Wed Jan 14, 2026

Resonant frequencies prioritize multi-looped structures or higher-level loops close to the driving source, while the network is prone to vessel shunting away from resonances — underscoring the importance of short-term pulsatility on long-term structures in adapting, periodically driven elastic flow networks like mammalian vasculature.

[PRX Life 4, 013006] Published Tue Jan 13, 2026

By studying three dimensional cell shapes and tissue structure in the developing fruit fly embryo, this study uncovers how epithelial cells exchange neighbors over their full apical-basal span during convergent extension — revealing new insights into the structure & dynamics of remodeling epithelia.

[PRX Life 4, 013005] Published Mon Jan 12, 2026

Multicellular clusters remain fluid and move together in low chemoattractant gradients, while above a threshold gradient clusters become unstable due to local, cluster-shape dependent velocity differentials that cause them to eventually break apart.

[PRX Life 4, 013004] Published Fri Jan 09, 2026