Related papers: Across and beyond the cell are peptide strings
We introduce a model for describing the dynamics of large numbers of interacting cells. The fundamental dynamical variables in the model are sub-cellular elements, which interact with each other through phenomenological intra- and…
Music, enchanting and poetic, permeates every corner of human civilization. Although music is not unfamiliar to people, our understanding of its essence remains limited, and there is still no universally accepted scientific description.…
Droplet formation has emerged as an essential concept for the spatiotemporal organisation of biomolecules in cells. However, classical descriptions of droplet dynamics based on passive liquid-liquid phase separation cannot capture the…
"Necks" are features of lipid membranes characterized by an uniquley large curvature, functioning as bridges between different compartments. These features are ubiquitous in the life-cycle of the cell and instrumental in processes such as…
Biological membranes mainly consist of lipids and proteins. While the proteins have many functions as single molecules, the membrane as a whole displays physical properties that cannot be explained on the single molecule level. For example,…
Cells and tissues change shape both to carry out their function and during pathology. In most cases, these deformations are driven from within the systems themselves. This is permitted by a range of molecular actors, such as active…
The role of continua has been clear since antiquity in the mathematical approaches to physics, while discrete manifolds were brought to the limelight mostly by Quantum and Information Theories, in the XX century. We first recall how…
The biological cell exhibits a fantastic range of behaviors, but ultimately these are governed by a handful of physical and chemical principles. Here we explore simple theory, known for decades and based on the simple thermodynamics of…
Two crucial elements facilitate the understanding and control of communicable disease spread within a social setting. These components are, the underlying contact structure among individuals that determines the pattern of disease…
Several aspects of mathematical astrobiology are discussed. It is argued that around the time of the origin of life the handedness of biomolecules must have established itself through an instability. Possible pathways of producing a certain…
The mainstream view of meaning is that it is emergent, not fundamental, but some have disputed this, asserting that there is a more fundamental level of reality than that addressed by current physical theories, and that matter and meaning…
The life of a cell is governed by highly dynamical microscopic processes. Two notable examples are the diffusion of membrane receptors and the kinetics of transcription factors governing the rates of gene expression. Different fluorescence…
Metabolism is a fascinating cell machinery underlying life and disease and genome-scale reconstructions provide us with a captivating view of its complexity. However, deciphering the relationship between metabolic structure and function…
The esteemed physicist Erwin Schroedinger, whose name is associated with the most notorious equation of quantum mechanics, also wrote a brief essay entitled 'What is Life?', asking: 'How can the events in space and time which take place…
Living systems are hierarchical control systems that display a small world network structure, in which many smaller clusters are nested within fewer larger ones, producing a fractal-like structure with a power-law cluster size distribution…
This essay presents a critical evaluation of the concepts of string theory and its impact on particle physics. The point of departure is a historical review of four decades of string theory within the broader context of six decades of…
Many mechanisms, functions and structures of life have been unraveled. However, the fundamental driving force that propelled chemical evolution and led to life has remained obscure. The 2nd law of thermodynamics, written as an equation of…
The capacity to precisely edit genomes has outpaced our ability to predict the consequences. A cell can be genetically perfect and therapeutically useless: edited exactly as intended, yet unstable, drifting toward unintended fates, or…
Understanding the patterns and processes of diversification of life in the planet is a key challenge of science. The Tree of Life represents such diversification processes through the evolutionary relationships among the different taxa, and…
This article surveys some of the highlights in the development of string theory through the first superstring revolution in 1984. The emphasis is on topics in which the author was involved, especially the observation that critical string…