The Physics of Microorganisms  

This one-day satellite meeting will explore a broad range of topics in ‘The Physics of Microorganisms’. Microorganisms play a crucial role in our everyday lives, impacting a huge range of important processes in food, medicine, biotechnology and the environment. It is hoped that quantitative science, and specifically biophysics, can continue to contribute to our understanding of microorganisms and help solve some of the major problems faced by humanity, such as antibiotic resistance, clean water, cheap food, cheap energy, reduced pollution, production of pharmaceuticals, healthy ecologies etc. How do we make sense of the vast range of behaviors demonstrated by the estimated ~10³⁰ bacteria, ~10³¹ bacteriophage and ~10²⁸ eukaryotic microbes on planet Earth? Our understanding of the best characterized living microbe (E. coli) is still far from complete and we need new quantitative physical tools to approach the astronomical scope of the problems involved (the size of the known universe in millimetres is ~10³⁰).

Modern fields in the biophysics of viruses, bacteria and eukaryotic microorganisms will be covered both from a pure and an applied perspective. Emphasis will be given to biofilms, capsules, electrophysiology, evolutionary microbiology, machine learning, photonics techniques, high-through-put experiments, microorganism physiology, fluid mechanics, microfluidics, active matter and soft matter physics. Participation from academics, biotechnologists and medical scientists will be welcomed.