Moodle@Warwick

The Physical Biology of the Cell module is a core module of the MSc IBR, which underpins the MRC-funded IBR DTP.

The module aims to provide a physical sciences perspective to cellular biology and equip postgraduate students to begin a research career at the interface of biology and physics.

You will explore the basic physical concepts underlying the behaviour of biomolecules, dynamic cell processes, cellular structure and signalling events. You will learn how to estimate sizes, speed and energy requirements for a variety of biological processes and build simple explicit models to fit experimental data from cell biological experiments.

PBoC is about learning to ask and answer quantitative scientific questions in the realm of biophysical cell biology.

It is arguably possible to sask scientific questions that are not quantitative*, but in general, useful scientific ideas make quantitative predictions that can be tested by observation and experiment. And arguably again, the most powerful scientific ideas are those that make the firmest quantitative predictions, and can thereby be definitively disproved.

Our goal with this course is to equip you with a basic set of tools to think quantitatively about the biological world, design better (more incisive) experiments, and analyse and interpret your data in useful and formally correct ways.

On completing the module, you should be able to analyse and quantify physical biological properties and behaviours of living systems; formulate scientific questions by harnessing the core concepts of physical biology and design experiments that effectively address your scientific questions.

PBoC is designed to help you to think!  Your instructors will aim to make the material challenging, but accessible, and above all, interesting.