Research Research Physics in Biological Information One of the most important dynamical phenomena in nature is the evolution of biological systems, my principal field of research today and in the near future. A central aspect of our work is the biological information encoded in DNA or protein sequences.
Sequences are similar due to their common evolutionary ancestry, and they differ due to mutations.
The recognition and analysis of sequence similarities is one of the most widely used mathematical tools in modern molecular biology. Similar concepts from physics should also help to understand the dynamics of biological evolution on large scales of space and time. This is the process of originations, migrations, and extinctions of species, which has produced the ever-growing diversity of the living world. These systems are ubiquitous in nature, and they are a challenge for the theorist since traditional methods often fail. Recently the field-theoretic framework has been generalized to fluid membranes and semiflexible polymers.