Related papers: Why is life so exact?
It is a fascinating subject to explore how well we can understand the processes of life on the basis of fundamental laws of physics. It is emphasised that viewing biological processes as manipulation of information extracts their essential…
In the 1970s, the renowned physicist Victor Weisskopf famously developed a research program to qualitatively explain properties of matter in terms of the fundamental constants of physics. But there was one type of matter prominently missing…
Proteins are intricate molecular machines whose complexity arises from the heterogeneity of the amino acid building blocks and their dynamic network of many-body interactions. These nanomachines gain function when put in the context of a…
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,…
One of the outstanding problems of philosophy of science and mathematics today is whether there is just "one" unique mathematics or the same can be bifurcated into "pure" and "applied" categories. A novel solution for this problem is…
The formation of DNA loops by proteins and protein complexes is ubiquitous to many fundamental cellular processes, including transcription, recombination, and replication. Here we review recent advances in understanding the properties of…
The reproduction of a living cell requires a repeatable set of chemical events to be properly coordinated. Such events define a replication cycle, coupling the growth and shape change of the cell membrane with internal metabolic reactions.…
2019 marked the 75th anniversary of the publication of Erwin Schr\"{o}dinger's "What is Life?", a short book described by Roger Penrose in his preface to a reprint of this classic as "among the most influential scientific writings of the…
Molecular chirality is inherent to biology and cellular chemistry. In this report, the origin of enantiomeric selectivity is analyzed from the viewpoint of the "RNA World" model, based on the autocatalytic self-replication of glyceraldehyde…
The concept of evolutionary development of structures constituted a \emph{real} revolution in biology: it was possible to understand how the very complex structures of life can arise in an out-of-equilibrium system. The investigation of…
Proteins are macromolecules that mediate a significant fraction of the cellular processes that underlie life. An important task in bioengineering is designing proteins with specific 3D structures and chemical properties which enable…
In complex systems, the interplay between nonlinear and stochastic dynamics, e.g., J. Monod's necessity and chance, gives rise to an evolutionary process in Darwinian sense, in terms of discrete jumps among attractors, with punctuated…
Theoretical physicists have been fascinated by the phenomena of life for more than a century. As we engage with more realistic descriptions of living systems, however, things get complicated. After reviewing different reactions to this…
Through extensive studies of dynamical system modeling cellular growth and reproduction, we find evidence that complexity arises in multicellular organisms naturally through evolution. Without any elaborate control mechanism, these systems…
This thesis broadly concerns the origins of life problem, pursuing a joint approach that combines general philosophical/conceptual reflection on the problem along with more detailed and formal scientific modelling work oriented in the…
Cellular biology exists embedded in a world dominated by random dynamics and chance. Many vital molecules and pieces of cellular machinery diffuse within cells, moving along random trajectories as they collide with the other biomolecular…
The sequence of nucleotide bases occurring in an organism's DNA is often regarded as a codescript for its construction. However, information in a DNA sequence can only be regarded as a codescript relative to an operational biochemical…
We demonstrate that the system of fine-tuning constraints for life is, in a sense, overdetermined: the a priori probability of its feasibility is extremely low, especially in the chemical sector. This entails that the structure of the…
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…
Living systems exhibit a range of fundamental characteristics: they are active, self-referential, self-modifying systems. This paper explores how these characteristics create challenges for conventional scientific approaches and why they…