This book is a lucid, straightforward introduction to the concepts and techniques of statistical physics that students of biology, biochemistry, and biophysics must know. It provides a sound basis for understanding random motions of molecules, subcellular particles, or cells, or of processes that depend on such motion or are markedly affected by it. Readers do not need to understand thermodynamics in order to acquire a knowledge of the physics involved in diffusion, sedimentation, electrophoresis, chromatography, and cell motility--subjects that become lively and immediate when the author discusses them in terms of random walks of individual particles.
This book is a lucid, straightforward introduction to the concepts and techniques of statistical physics that students of biology, biochemistry, and biophysics must know. It provides a sound basis for understanding random motions of molecules, subcellular particles, or cells, or of processes that depend on such motion or are markedly affected by it. Readers do not need to understand thermodynamics in order to acquire a knowledge of the physics involved in diffusion, sedimentation, electrophoresis, chromatography, and cell motility--subjects that become lively and immediate when the author discusses them in terms of random walks of individual particles.
Howard Berg Random Walks In Biology.pdf
The concept of random walk was first introduced by Karl Pearson in1905, and he used random walks to describe how mosquito could infestsa forest. At about the same time, Albert Einstein introduced Brownianmovement to describe the movement of a particle of dust in the air.
In Figure 5, we observe an important property of random walks:because it takes a shorter time to explore closer regions, theparticle tends to explore proximal regions,before exploring more distant regions. After one rarer eventof wandering away, it process to do more local explorations.Because the random walk has no memory, there is never a knowledgeof what has or has not been explored in the past.
We had obtained this result before, when looking at the microscopicrandom walks for large \(N\). If you think about it (Figure 1), wewhere injecting independent particles as a given position, at timezero, just the initial conditions we proposed here.
Moving aphids appear (naively) to follow a correlated random walk [24]; see Fig. 1B. In an (unbiased) correlated random walk, an individual walks in a straight line of a certain (random) step length , turns from its previous heading at an angle θ that is random but drawn from a mean-zero distribution, and then repeats. In our model, we will assume that the correlated random walk parameters depend solely on distance to nearest neighbor, similar to the transition probabilities discussed above. For step length, we choose the simplest model, meaning that there is no spread in the step length distribution. A moving aphid's step length depends deterministically on its distance to nearest neighbor d. For turning angle θ, the mean of the distribution is zero by the assumption of symmetry of the correlated random walk. Therefore, we model dependence on d in the spread ρ of the turning angle distribution.
We now turn to the parameters governing moving aphids' correlated random walks. Fig. 3 shows the mean step length as a function of d, with each point in the scatterplot corresponding to a bin of 800 data points. Because there is a coherent rise in the data for small d, we consider the model (5)
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