Soft matter flexibility, stochasticity and cooperativity in biological conformations and dynamics

The biopolymers and membranes constitute the basic ingredients of the biological systems in cellular level. Due to complexity and low dimensionality in their primary structures, they manifest variety and flexibility, which is the basis of conformational transitions relevant to biological functions. Also, the novel noise-induced phenomena such as stochastic resonance and ratchet give rise to new possibilities for biological cooperativity and sensitivity to environments. In this vein, this paper reviews our recent theoretical studies of conformational transition and dynamics occuring in the polymer/membrane systems, along with the basic methodology of soft matter and stochastic process theory.