Related papers: Living Devices
The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…
The growth of world population, limitation of resources, economic problems and environmental issues force engineers to develop increasingly efficient solutions for logistic systems. Pure optimization for efficiency, however, has often led…
The multifarious internal workings of organisms are difficult to reconcile with a single feature defining a state of being alive. Indeed, definitions of life rely on emergent properties (growth, capacity to evolve, agency) only symptomatic…
Biological molecules, like all active matter, use free energy to generate force and motion which drive them out of thermal equilibrium, and undergo inherent dynamic interconversion between metastable free energy states separated by levels…
In today's world of big data, computational analysis has become a key driver of biomedical research. Recent exponential growth in the volume of available omics data has reshaped the landscape of contemporary biology, creating demand for a…
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…
Modeling biological processes is a highly demanding task because not all processes are fully understood. Mathematical models allow us to test hypotheses about possible mechanisms of biological processes. The mathematical mechanisms…
Robustness, the ability of a system to maintain performance under significant and unanticipated environmental changes, is a critical property for robotic systems. While biological systems naturally exhibit robustness, there is no…
The full understanding of cellular functions requires information about protein numbers for various biomolecular assemblies and their dynamics, which can be partly accessed by super-resolution fluorescence microscopy. Yet, many protein…
Living systems operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Enzymatic activity can induce broken detailed balance at the molecular scale. This molecular scale breaking of detailed balance is crucial to achieve biological functions such as…
Wearable devices that measure and record physiological signals are now becoming widely available to the general public with ever-increasing affordability and signal quality. The data from these devices introduce serious ethical challenges…
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…
Understanding the behaviour of biological systems requires a complex setting of in vitro and in vivo experiments, which attracts high costs in terms of time and resources. The use of mathematical models allows researchers to perform…
The dynamics of biological systems, from proteins to cells to organisms, is complex and stochastic. To decipher their physical laws, we need to bridge between experimental observations and theoretical modeling. Thanks to progress in…
This paper explores the idea that information is an essential and distinctive feature of living systems. Unlike non-living systems, living systems actively acquire, process, and use information about their environments to respond to…
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…
Computation of biological processes creates great promise for everyday life and great challenges for physical scientists. Simulations of molecular dynamics appeal to biologists as a natural extension of structural biology. Once biologists…
Cellular behavior is governed by gene regulatory processes that are intrinsically dynamic and nonlinear, and are subject to non-negligible amounts of random fluctuations. Such conditions are ubiquitous in physical systems, where they have…
Synthetic Biology is the new engineering-based approach to biology that includes applications of designing complex biological devices. At present, it is not yet clear what will emerge as the defining principles of Synthetic Biology. One…
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…