לוח שנה משולב

The celebrated KPZ equation (Kardar, Parisi, Zhang, 1986) is an important milestone in statistical physics, originally introduced to describe the late time dynamics in two dimensional growth models. Over the last 30 years, the KPZ story has evolved in various interesting directions, making links on the way to different areas of physics and mathematics. This includes in particular the link to the famous Tracy-Widom distribution in random matrix theory. The story of KPZ is a very successful one, involving theoretical physics, mathematics and experiments--a fertile playground for interdisciplinary science. In this talk, I will review the evolution of the KPZ story, pointing out the important landmarks as I go along. At the very end, I will discuss some recent developments establishing a nice link between the KPZ height fluctuations and the edge physics in cold atom systems.

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is the most common leukemia in the Western world. The disease is characterized by decreased apoptosis and accumulation of mature B lymphocytes. We have previously shown that CD74 induces a downstream cascade that regulates CLL survival. Recently, we showed that CD74-intracellular domain interacts with the transcription factors RUNX and NF-B and binds to proximal and distal regulatory sites enriched for genes involved in apoptosis, immune response and cell migration. One of CD74 target genes is CD84. Our results demonstrate that CD84 mediates the interaction of CLL cells with their microenvironment inducing cell survival. In addition, activation of CD84 elevates PD-L1 expression on CLL cells and their microenvironment which interact with PD-1 expressed on T cells. Our results suggest CD84 blockade as a novel therapeutic strategy to reverse tumor-induced immune suppression.

The governing role of hydrophobic interactions in countless biological phenomena and technological systems, including protein folding, transmembrane proteins, cell membranes, detergents, paints, decontamination of pollute water, and more, has motivated extensive theoretical and experimental efforts aimed at deciphering the microscopic foundations of this interaction. Yet, after more than a century of extensive research a full predictive theory of this elusive phenomenon is still missing, largely due to the lack of suitable experimental techniques capable of probing the interface between hydrophobic surfaces and water at high enough resolution. In the talk, I will present our recent explorations of this interface using an ultra-high resolution atomic force microscope built in-house for the task and disclose compelling evidence that the hydrophobic interaction reflects a phase transition taking place in the medium when two hydrophobic surfaces approach each other to within a few nanometers. Along the way I'll demonstrate the sub-atomic resolution of our microscope and its value for the study of water structure near surfaces and biomolecules.

Mass spectrometry based proteomics became an enabling technology in the investigation of proteins and proteomes – from protein dynamics, through signaling, protein network interaction to structural determination. The combination of chemical crosslinking of proteins with mass spectrometry (XL-MS) opened up an opportunity to investigate protein-protein interactions within the framework of a whole proteome, even in-vivo, as well as provide a powerful tool for structure determination of proteins and protein complexes. In recent years, improvement in instrumentation and computing power led to improved accessibility of this technique to the non-expert researcher. However, XL-MS suffers from basic deficiencies due to intrinsic issues with sample preparation, data acquisition and analysis. In this tutorial we will discuss current hardware and software capabilities and limitations, and how experiment design can best utilize current capabilities for a successful experiment