Related papers: Across and beyond the cell are peptide strings
Living tissue is able to withstand large stresses in everyday life, yet it also actively adapts to dynamic loads. This remarkable mechanical behaviour emerges from the interplay between living cells and their non-living extracellular…
The biological immune system is a robust, complex, adaptive system that defends the body from foreign pathogens. It is able to categorize all cells (or molecules) within the body as self-cells or non-self cells. It does this with the help…
Cosmic strings are one-dimensional topological defects which could have been formed in the early stages of our Universe. They triggered a lot of interest, mainly for their cosmological implications: they could offer an alternative to…
The origin of life is often framed primarily as a chemical problem, yet life's defining feature is evolution. Advances in geochemistry, prebiotic chemistry, and molecular biology have produced diverse scenarios for the emergence of genomes,…
For more than 3.5 billion years, life experienced dramatic environmental extremes on Earth. These include shifts from oxygen-less to over-oxygenated atmospheres and cycling between hothouse conditions and global glaciations. Meanwhile, an…
Biomedical networks (or graphs) are universal descriptors for systems of interacting elements, from molecular interactions and disease co-morbidity to healthcare systems and scientific knowledge. Advances in artificial intelligence,…
Even when concepts similar to emergence have been used since antiquity, we lack an agreed definition. However, emergence has been identified as one of the main features of complex systems. Most would agree on the statement ``life is…
The cell is arguably the most fundamental unit of life and is central to understanding biology. Accurate modeling of cells is important for this understanding as well as for determining the root causes of disease. Recent advances in…
An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a…
The origin of life is one of the greatest mysteries. The mechanism for the synthesis of DNA is synonymous with the chemical origin of life, and theories have been developed along many lines of reasoning, but resolving all requirements…
In a cell or microorganism the processes that generate mass, energy, information transfer, and cell fate specification are seamlessly integrated through a complex network of various cellular constituents and reactions. However, despite the…
Design patterns are generalized solutions to frequently recurring problems. They were initially developed by architects and computer scientists to create a higher level of abstraction for their designs. Here, we extend these concepts to…
Making use of the wealth of new observational data coming from the sky it is possible to constrain particle physics theories beyond the Standard Model. One way to do this is illustrated in this article: a subset of theories admits cosmic…
Complex systems are characterized by specific time-dependent interactions among their many constituents. As a consequence they often manifest rich, non-trivial and unexpected behavior. Examples arise both in the physical and non-physical…
Life can be viewed as a localized chemical system that sits on, or in the basin of attraction of, a metastable dynamical attractor state that remains out of equilibrium with the environment. Such a view of life allows that new living states…
Living organisms are the most complex, interesting and significant objects regarding all substructures of the universe. Life science is regarded as a science of the 21st century and one can expect great new discoveries in the near futures.…
"Epigenetic Tracking" is a model of systems of biological cells, able to generate arbitrary 2 or 3-dimensional cellular shapes of any kind and complexity (in terms of number of cells, number of colours, etc.) starting from a single cell. If…
A better grasp of the physical foundations of life is necessary before we can understand the processes occurring inside a living cell. In his physical theory of the cell, American physiologist Gilbert Ling introduced an important notion of…
Biology is considered here as an "emergent science" in the sense of Anderson and of Laughlin and Pines. It is demonstrated that a straightforward mathematical definition of "biological system" is useful in showing how biology differs in…
Muscular dystrophy (MD) describes generalized progressive muscular weakness due to the wasting of muscle fibers. The progression of the disease is affected by known immunological and mechanical factors, and possibly other unknown…