Emanuele Locatelli

The physics of the cell surface: from molecular rules to cell-scale behaviour at King’s College London on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - The physics of the cell surface: from molecular rules to cell-scale behaviour at King’s College London, listed on FindAPhD.com

I am recruiting a #PhDstudent in Computational #Biophysics at @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social @kingslsm.bsky.social for October! Deadline February 28.

Details 👉 www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Please share with interested students!
#PhD #PhDposition #PhDSky #AcademicSky #computationalphysics 🧪⚛️

Worm-Inspired Active Filaments Sweep Disorder into Order The ability of single active filaments to cluster smaller particles could inspire new materials for building soft robots that perform biological functions.

Researchers have proposed and tested a strategy that enables a single active filament to act as a sweeping agent. Thanks to the versatility of polymer architectures, the investigation opens up a huge molecular-design space.

Temporal and spatial coordination of DNA segregation and cell division in an archaeon | PNAS Cells must coordinate DNA segregation with cytokinesis to ensure that each daughter cell inherits a complete genome. Here, we explore how DNA segre...

Our paper on chromosome segregation in the archaeon Sulfolobus Acidocaldarius has been published in PNAS! This has been a great collaboration with @joeparham19.bsky.social and the rest of @buzzbaum.bsky.social's team. Stay tuned for more to come!😉 @istaresearch.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Recruitment poster for the Bhamla Lab. Top shows Georgia Tech and CU Boulder logos. Main headline: “Hiring Multiple Postdoctoral Researchers: Organismal Biomechanics, Soft Robotics, and Raman Diagnostics.” Left column lists four roles—Organismal Biology, Bioinspired Engineering, Raman Diagnostics, and a Curiosity‑Based slot—plus note of 3‑year funding from DARPA, NSF, NIH, and Schmidt. Right side features a vintage collage of a Victorian‑era scientist with robotic arm, insects, and globe, and a circular “Physics of Life” diagram linking biology, physics, engineering, and mathematics. Tan background, Bhamla Lab crest at top.

Hiring 4 postdocs — organismal biophysics, soft robotics, frugal Raman diagnostics, or your own bold idea.

3-year funding, $65K+ benefits. GT (Atlanta) now → CU Boulder BioFrontiers Institute in Fall ’26.

PDF/details in next post. Tag/share if someone comes to mind. 🧪🪲🪳#livingphysics

CECAM is thrilled to announce that Prof. Giulia Galli (UChicago) has been awarded the 2025 Berni J. Alder CECAM prize, for her transformative contributions to computational molecular science in the domain of novel methods for large-scale electronic structure & molecular dynamics simulations

How do archaea partition their genome just at the right time before cell division? Check out this new #preprint if you want to know! A great collaboration with Joe and the @buzzbaum.bsky.social lab! 🦠🧬

Reversible kink instability drives ultrafast jumping in nematodes and soft robots A soft jumping robot inspired by nematodes demonstrates ultrafast jumping using reversible kink instability and stiffness.

Excited to share our new work in @science.org #Robotics that shows how reversible kinks can help nematodes perform jumps 1000 times faster than you can blink! scim.ag/4iDIa1i
🧵:
Work co-led by @chemicalsunnyraj.bsky.social , @itiwari93.bsky.social and Victor Ortega-Jimenez with many other colleagues

Evaluating the impact of the Malakit intervention on malaria transmission in the Guiana Shield: a mathematical modelling study Malakit had a significant impact on malaria transmission by improving the access to treatment for the population working in illegal gold mining in French Guiana. Building on the regional efforts of th...

Between 2018 and 2020, the www.malakit-project.org distributed kits for malaria self-diagnosis and self-treatment to gold miners in French Guiana

In this work out on ‪@lancetrh-americ.bsky.social‬ we have used modelling to assess the impact of the intervention

www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Wonder why flamingos feed upside down? Check out our new work in @pnas.org that demonstrates how flamingos stir, stomp, and chatter to bend flow and trap prey www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
🧵:
Work led by Victor Ortega-Jimenez, with Pankaj and Ben from the Bhamla Lab

We also introduce a "pathway" of configurations, that includes all the relevant orientations between two particles, providing a clean representation of the "important" slice of the potential energy landscape. Super useful!

We take two models describing particles with an heterogeneous surface charge and showed that they can be matched, yielding a considerable improvement of the more "approximated" of the two models. Importantly, the procedure can be extended beyond the setting we considered (the linear PB regime)

Anisotropic DLVO-like interaction for charge patchiness in colloids and proteins - Nature Communications Electrostatic interactions play a key role in the behavior of soft and biological matter, yet their complexity increases when particle charge distributions are inhomogeneous. This work presents a unif...

📢! We worked out a way to bridge between different descriptions of heterogeneously charged colloids & proteins. Out in @natcomms.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41... Collaboration between @unipd.bsky.social @tuwien.at, Ljubljana University and JSI

The space writhes and signatures of polymer knots - The European Physical Journal B The space writhe of a knot is a property of its three-dimensional embedding that contains information about its underlying topology, but the correspondence between space writhe and other topological i...

Lezgo!

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Fabrication and Characterization of Bimetallic Silica-Based and 3D-Printed Active Colloidal Cubes Simulations on self-propelling active cubes reveal interesting behaviors at both the individual and the collective level, emphasizing the importance of developing experimental analogues that allow testing these theoretical predictions. The majority of experimental realizations of active colloidal cubes rely on light actuation and/or magnetic fields to have a persistent active mechanism and lack material versatility. Here, we propose a system of active bimetallic cubes whose propulsion mechanism is based on a catalytic reaction and study their behavior. We realize such a system from synthetic silica cuboids and 3D-printed microcubes, followed by the deposition of gold and platinum layers on their surface. We characterize the colloids’ dynamics for different thicknesses of the gold layer at low and high hydrogen peroxide concentrations. We show that the thickness of the base gold layer has only a minor effect on the self-propulsion speed and, in addition, induces a gravitational torque during sedimentation. For low activity, this gravitational torque orients the particles such that their velocity director is pointing out of the plane, thus effectively suppressing propulsion. We find that a higher active force can remedy the effects of torque, resulting in all possible particle orientations, including one with the metal cap on the side, which is favorable for in-plane propulsion. Finally, we use 3D printing to compare our results to cubes made from a different material, size, and roundness and demonstrate that the speed scaling with increasing particle size originates from the size-dependent drag. Our experiments extend the fabrication of active cubes to different materials and propulsion mechanisms and highlight that the design of active particles with anisotropic shapes requires consideration of the interplay between shape and activity to achieve favorable sedimentation and efficient in-plane propulsion.

Anisotropic active particles cannot always simply turn to change their orientation after having reached a surface: as we show for active colloidal cubes, this can lead to several populations with different particles speeds. Now out in Langmuir! pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Active Polymers Tie Themselves in Knots Simulations show that polymers that include inert and self-propelled components are more likely to form and retain knots, with possible applications in materials engineering.

DNA and other long molecules can become spontaneously entangled with themselves. Simulations have now shown that a molecule comprising two different polymers joined end to end—one inert, the other self-propelling—can accumulate knots more readily than a single-component chain of the same length.

Active Polymers Tie Themselves in Knots Simulations show that polymers that include inert and self-propelled components are more likely to form and retain knots, with possible applications in materials engineering.

Thanks to @physicsmagazine.bsky.social for the nice synopsis! physics.aps.org/articles/v18...
Also our artwork made the cover of PRL 🤘

Upsurge of Spontaneous Knotting in Polar Diblock Active Polymers Simulations show that polymers that include inert and self-propelled components are more likely to form and retain knots, with possible applications in materials engineering.

Very happy to see this work out! We propose a way to realize simple knots at the nano- and micro-scales using tangential activity with a diblock copolymer architecture. Work done @unipd.bsky.social

🧪In our new paper (journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...) in collaboration with Russo, Romano, Rovigatti and Sciortino groups in Rome / Venice, we look at Classical Nucleation Theory: a popular model of nucleation process, n is a key phenomena in self-assembly, self-organization and phase transitions.

As the COVID-19 pandemic emergency receded, we systematically reviewed modeling practices, data provisioning, and sharing among the modeling teams in the MOOD European consortium

Our pre-print is finally out

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Check out the thread by @esthervk.bsky.social below👇

I am very happy to share that my work on active deformations of lipid vesicles is finally out in Nature Physics. A nicer thread+movies coming soon, in the meantime:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thx to Andreas, Hammad, Dmitry, Gerhard @laynefrechette.bsky.social and everybody else who contributed!

How does protein charge distribution influence the force exerted by biomolecular condensates? We tried to answer this question in our first Bluesky 🦋 #preprint! tinyurl.com/3fzuufy3 1/8

Thank you! I came here to carry on my long standing lurking activity