Related papers: Emergence of information transmission in a prebiot…
The ubiquity of information transmission via molecular communication between cells is comprehensively documented on Earth; this phenomenon might even have played a vital role in the origin(s) and early evolution of life. Motivated by these…
The origin of life can be understood mathematically to be the origin of information that can replicate. The likelihood that entropy spontaneously becomes information can be calculated from first principles, and depends exponentially on the…
A polarizable environment, prominently the solvent, responds to electronic changes in biomolecules rapidly. The knowledge of conformational relaxation of the biomolecule itself, however, may be scarce or missing. In this work, we describe…
Through in-depth thinking and reasoning about the conditions required for cells to maintain unchanged material distribution, it is concluded that life metabolic reactions require high information content. However, the self-replication of a…
In this paper, we present a communication protocol between a pair of biological nanomachines, transmitter and receiver, built upon molecular communications in an aqueous environment. In our proposal, the receiver, acting as a control node,…
Many models for the origin of life have focused on understanding how evolution can drive the refinement of a preexisting enzyme, such as the evolution of efficient replicase activity. Here we present a model for what was, arguably, an even…
Eukaryotic cells are often exposed to fluctuations in growth conditions as well as endogenous and exogenous stress-related agents. In addition, during development global patterns of gene transcription change dramatically, and these changes…
Virtually all cells use energy and ion-specific membrane pumps to maintain large transmembrane gradients of Na$^+$, K$^+$, Cl$^-$, Mg$^{++}$, and Ca$^{++}$. Although they consume up to 1/3 of a cell's energy budget, the corresponding…
Self-replication is a capacity common to every species of living thing, and simple physical intuition dictates that such a process must invariably be fueled by the production of entropy. Here, we undertake to make this intuition rigorous…
One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…
A continuing frustration for origin of life scientists is that abiotic and, by extension, pre-biotic attempts to develop self-sustaining, evolving molecular systems tend to produce more dead-end substances than macromolecular products with…
Molecular recognition, which is essential in processing information in biological systems, takes place in a crowded noisy biochemical environment and requires the recognition of a specific target within a background of various similar…
A mystery about the origins of life is which molecular structures $-$ and what spontaneous processes $-$ drove the autocatalytic transition from simple chemistry to biology? Using the HP lattice model of polymer sequence spaces leads to the…
Living systems relay information across membrane interfaces to coordinate compartment functions. We identify a physical mechanism for selective information transmission that arises from the sigmoidal response of surface-bound particle…
We introduce and numerically study a model designed to mimic the bulk behavior of a system composed of single-stranded DNA dendrimers. Complementarity of the base sequences of different strands results in the formation of strong cooperative…
Irreversibility, in which a transient perturbation leaves a system in a new state, is an emergent property in systems of interacting entities. This property has well-established implications in statistical physics but remains underexplored…
We observe the propagation of information in a system of self-replicating strings of code (``Artificial Life'') as a function of fitness and mutation rate. Comparison with theoretical predictions based on the reaction-diffusion equation…
Biochemical reaction systems in mesoscopic volume, under sustained environmental chemical gradient(s), can have multiple stochastic attractors. Two distinct mechanisms are known for their origins: ($a$) Stochastic single-molecule events,…
Cells sense environmental signals and transmit information intracellularly through changes in the abundance of molecular components. Such molecular abundances can be measured in single cells and exhibit significant heterogeneity in clonal…
Molecular communication is an expanding body of research. Recent advances in biology have encouraged using genetically engineered bacteria as the main component in the molecular communication. This has stimulated a new line of research that…