07 Fakultät Konstruktions-, Produktions- und Fahrzeugtechnik

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    The physics behind systems biology
    (2016) Radde, Nicole; Hütt, Marc-Thorsten
    Systems Biology is a young and rapidly evolving research field, which combines experimental techniques and mathematical modeling in order to achieve a mechanistic understanding of processes underlying the regulation and evolution of living systems. Systems Biology is often associated with an Engineering approach: The purpose is to formulate a data-rich, detailed simulation model that allows to perform numerical (‘in silico’) experiments and then draw conclusions about the biological system. While methods from Engineering may be an appropriate approach to extending the scope of biological investigations to experimentally inaccessible realms and to supporting data-rich experimental work, it may not be the best strategy in a search for design principles of biological systems and the fundamental laws underlying Biology. Physics has a long tradition of characterizing and understanding emergent collective behaviors in systems of interacting units and searching for universal laws. Therefore, it is natural that many concepts used in Systems Biology have their roots in Physics. With an emphasis on Theoretical Physics, we will here review the ‘Physics core’ of Systems Biology, show how some success stories in Systems Biology can be traced back to concepts developed in Physics, and discuss how Systems Biology can further benefit from ist Theoretical Physics foundation.
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    Adaptive method for quantitative estimation of glucose and fructose concentrations in aqueous solutions based on infrared nanoantenna optics
    (2019) Schuler, Benjamin; Kühner, Lucca; Hentschel, Mario; Giessen, Harald; Tarín, Cristina
    In life science and health research one observes a continuous need for new concepts and methods to detect and quantify the presence and concentration of certain biomolecules-preferably even in vivo or aqueous solutions. One prominent example, among many others, is the blood glucose level, which is highly important in the treatment of, e.g., diabetes mellitus. Detecting and, in particular, quantifying the amount of such molecular species in a complex sensing environment, such as human body fluids, constitutes a significant challenge. Surface-enhanced infrared absorption (SEIRA) spectroscopy has proven to be uniquely able to differentiate even very similar molecular species in very small concentrations. We are thus employing SEIRA to gather the vibrational response of aqueous glucose and fructose solutions in the mid-infrared spectral range with varying concentration levels down to 10 g/l. In contrast to previous work, we further demonstrate that it is possible to not only extract the presence of the analyte molecules but to determine the quantitative concentrations in a reliable and automated way. For this, a baseline correction method is applied to pre-process the measurement data in order to extract the characteristic vibrational information. Afterwards, a set of basis functions is fitted to capture the characteristic features of the two examined monosaccharides and a potential contribution of the solvent itself. The reconstruction of the actual concentration levels is then performed by superposition of the different basis functions to approximate the measured data. This software-based enhancement of the employed optical sensors leads to an accurate quantitative estimate of glucose and fructose concentrations in aqueous solutions.