Welcome to Penn Physiology! We invite you to spend time on our site and learn more about our vibrant department.
ExploreOur research includes Cytoskeleton, Motor Proteins and Cell & Organellar Motility,Integrative Physiology & Metabolism,Signal Transduction
ExploreMar 31, 2025 @ 3:00PM
Seminar: Enrique De La Cruz, PhDCRB, Austrian Auditorium
Enrique De La Cruz, PhD, Professor, Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Yale University; Title: "How Cells use Chemistry and Physics to Break and Remodel the Bones that Power their Movement"
Apr 03, 2025 @ 9:30AM
Ion Channel Journal Clubhttps://pennmedicine.zoom.us/j/95699145820
Speaker: Claire Mitchell
Apr 07, 2025 @ 3:00PM
Seminar: Qiangjun Zhou, PhDCRB, Austrian Auditorium
Qiangjun Zhou, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, Vanderbilt University; Title: "Exploring Higher-Order Protein-Membrane Assemblies Using Cryogenic Electron Tomography"
Mar 19, 2025
Dynamics of β-cardiac myosin between the super-relaxed and disordered-relaxed statesPhysiology is the study of how living systems function. Physiologists seek to describe biological processes in physical and chemical terms. Accordingly, physiologists can be trained in diverse, which enable them to bring unique insights and technical approaches to study living systems from the sub-cellular level to the whole organism. For example, faculty in our Department have been trained in chemistry, medicine, zoology, physics, biochemistry, mathematics, biophysics, cell and developmental biology, neurobiology, and, believe it or not, physiology. Physiologists may be interested in the molecular function of individual molecules such as enzymes, membrane transporters, or molecular motors, or in how these molecules interact within a network to generate higher-level biological activities.
Penn Physiology faculty have particular strengths in the molecular biophysics of membrane transport proteins and biological motors, as well as in the cell physiology and integrative biology of transport, motility, signaling and metabolism. We employ a wide range of experimental techniques in the fields of cell and molecular biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, genetics, genomics, and bioinformatics. It may not be an overstatement to suggest that Physiology enables insights from biophysics, biochemistry, molecular biology, cell biology, genetics, and pharmacology to be described in an integrated manner that can be applied to human medicine. Much of clinical medicine relies on understanding molecular, cellular and organ-system physiology.
Organizing organelles in a neuron: The image highlights the elaborate architecture of a dendritic arbor of a rat hippocampal neuron and depicts contacts between mitochondria (magenta), Rab7-positive late endosomes/lysosomes (cyan), and FMRP-positive RNA granules (yellow) that help determine the organization of this neuron. (Co-authors: Erika Holzbaur, Tom Jongens)
tRNA localization in an adult rat cardiomyocyte. orange stains the microtubules, blue stains tRNA-GlyGCC, and purple stains the nucleus.
Neuromuscular Junction in Whole Skeletal Muscles: The neuromuscular junction (NMJ) is a complex structure that mediates the cross-talk between motor neurons and muscle fibers, serving as the master controller of many facets of skeletal muscle contractile function. The confocal image of the mature NMJs in EDL muscles shows the postsynaptic apparatus (red pretzel-like nicotinic acetylcholine receptor) and motor neuron (green).
Kissing Nuclei: Two human fibroblast cells were experimentally fused into a binucleated cell and their nuclei were imaged using the super-resolution microscopy technique STORM. The picture here is a color-coded rendering of Voronoi density for Histone 2B
Isolated adult rat cardiomyocyte illustrating the stochasticity of transcriptional activation both among nuclei and among transcripts within the same cell. Hoechst is shown in gray, alpha-actinin protein immunofluorescence is shown in blue, and Actc1 and Actn2 mRNA transcripts are shown in yellow and magenta, respectively.
This is a 3D super-resolution image of mitochondria in a cos7 cell. The color bar corresponds to z-position within the cell, with blue corresponding to the lowest point in the cell and red the highest.
Super Resolution Image
This image depicts 4 cryo-EM 2D class averages for the cytoskeletal protein CARMIL. 2D class averages are used in cryo-EM to ensure that the target particle is homogenous and contains well-defined features necessary to determine the structure. These class averages of CARMIL not only depict the well-defined features of the molecule, but also show the unique figure-8 shape formed from antiparallel leucine-rich repeat folds.
Super Resolution Image
Super-resolution image of microtubules and tau aggregates (α-tubulin in magenta P301L tau in cyan) (in cells that express GFP-P301L tau and contain tau aggregates) Credit: Melina Gyparaki
The Deutsch laboratory is the only one studying the early stages of folding of Kv proteins and one of a few laboratories studying the functional biophysical properties of the exit tunnel.
Ben is an emerging leader in new, exciting aspects of the molecular physiology of cardiomyocyte function and signaling. The photo featured here is credited to his lab.
Zhe Lu, MD, PhD is an internationally recognized leader in studies of potassium channel ion permeation.