Related papers: Across and beyond the cell are peptide strings
A notion of biologic system or just a system implies a functional wholeness of comprising system components. Positive and negative feedback are the examples of how the idea to unite anatomical elements in the whole functional structure was…
All cells must keep time to consistently perform vital biological functions. To that end, the coupling and interrelatedness of diverse subsecond events in the complex cellular environment, such as protein folding or translation rates,…
The discipline of `theoretical biology' has been developing from its inception several decades ago almost in parallel with the advances in biology, so much so that the latter is often considered to be almost exclusively an empirical…
Single-cell analysis is currently one of the most high-resolution techniques to study biology. The large complex datasets that have been generated have spurred numerous developments in computational biology, in particular the use of…
Network biology is an interdisciplinary field bridging computational and biological sciences that has proved pivotal in advancing the understanding of cellular functions and diseases across biological systems and scales. Although the field…
The search for life elsewhere in the universe is a pivotal question in modern science. However, to address whether life is common in the universe we must first understand the likelihood of abiogenesis by studying the origin of life on…
The idea that particles are the basic constituents of all matter dates back to ancient times and formed the basis of physical thought well into modern times. The debate about whether light was a wave or a stream of particles also lasted…
A cell's behavior is a consequence of the complex interactions between its numerous constituents, such as DNA, RNA, proteins and small molecules. Cells use signaling pathways and regulatory mechanisms to coordinate multiple processes,…
Physical emergence - crystals, rocks, sandpiles, turbulent eddies, planets, stars - is fundamentally different from biological emergence - amoeba, cells, mice, humans - even though the latter is based in the former. This paper points out…
Cells forming various epithelial tissues have a strikingly universal distribution for the number of their edges. It is generally assumed that this topological feature is predefined by the statistics of individual cell divisions in growing…
As an injury heals, an embryo develops, or a carcinoma spreads, epithelial cells systematically change their shape. In each of these processes cell shape is studied extensively, whereas variation of shape from cell-to-cell is dismissed most…
A framework is presented for understanding the common character of proteins. Proteins are linear chain molecules. However, the simple model of a polymer viewed as spheres tethered together does not account for many of the observed…
Rapid advance of experimental techniques provides an unprecedented in-depth view into complex developmental processes. Still, little is known on how the complexity of multicellular organisms evolved by elaborating developmental programs and…
String theory and supersymmetry are theoretical ideas that go beyond the standard model of particle physics and show promise for unifying all forces. After a brief introduction to supersymmetry, we discuss the prospects for its experimental…
Understanding the biological mechanisms of disease is crucial for medicine, and in particular, for drug discovery. AI-powered analysis of genome-scale biological data holds great potential in this regard. The increasing availability of…
A dynamic model for cell differentiation is studied, where cells with internal chemical reaction dynamics interact with each other and replicate. It leads to spontaneous differentiation of cells and determination, as is discussed in the…
Would another origin of life resemble Earth's biochemical use of amino acids? Here we review current knowledge at three levels: 1) Could other classes of chemical structure serve as building blocks for biopolymer structure and catalysis?…
Cancer research reflects an implicit conflict. On the one hand, there is an overwhelming desire to control the disease. We all wish that. On the other hand, we would like to understand why cancer follows so many clearly defined yet puzzling…
Biological and cellular systems are often modeled as graphs in which vertices represent objects of interest (genes, proteins, drugs) and edges represent relational ties among these objects (binds-to, interacts-with, regulates). This…
In higher organisms, all cells share the same genome, but every cell expresses only a limited and specific set of genes that defines the cell type. During cell division, not only the genome, but also the cell type is inherited by the…