The physics of phages

Abstract

Even the simplest living system is extraordinarily complicated. A bacterium, for example, is a single-celled organism that hunts for food, evades predators, grows, and reproduces itself. It's not surprising, then, that its genome includes thousands of genes, and that spectacular advances in understanding bacteria and other "simple" organisms have been made without resorting to a reductionist approach to biology - the notion that living systems can be understood from interactions at the scale of atoms and molecules. © 2008 American Institute of Physics.