Related papers: Thermodynamics of metabolic energy conversion unde…
Living systems continuously transform matter and energy through the chemical processes that constitute their metabolism. The overall metabolic rate of an organism correlates positively with its body mass, however both the exact scaling…
Muscles are biological actuators extensively studied in the frame of Hill's classic empirical model as isolated biomechanical entities, which hardly applies to a living organism subjected to physiological and environmental constraints. Here…
Quantitative studies of cell metabolism are often based on large chemical reaction network models. A steady state approach is suited to analyze phenomena on the timescale of cell growth and circumvents the problem of incomplete experimental…
Obesity does not emerge abruptly; rather, it develops gradually over extended periods. The gradual progression often prevents early recognition of physiological changes until excess adiposity is established. A common belief is that weight…
It is shown that the dual to the linear programming problem that arises in constraint-based models of metabolism can be given a thermodynamic interpretation in which the shadow prices are chemical potential analogues, and the objective is…
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has long been an area of substantial interest to ecologists because most fundamental biological processes, such as protein synthesis and respiration, are inherently energy-consuming. Microbial communities are…
Adaptive systems -- such as a biological organism gaining survival advantage, an autonomous robot executing a functional task, or a motor protein transporting intracellular nutrients -- must model the regularities and stochasticity in their…
The dynamics of microbial communities is incredibly complex, determined by competition for metabolic substrates and cross-feeding of byproducts. Species in the community grow by harvesting energy from chemical reactions that transform…
The origin and shape of metabolic scaling has been controversial since Kleiber found that basal metabolic rate of animals seemed to vary as a power law of their body mass with exponent 3/4, instead of 2/3, as a surface-to-volume argument…
Energy-based modelling brings engineering insight to the understanding of biomolecular systems. It is shown how well-established control engineering concepts, such as loop-gain, arise from energy feedback loops and are therefore amenable to…
Natural selection has shaped the evolution of cells and multi-cellular organisms such that social cooperation can often be preferred over an individualistic approach to metabolic regulation. This paper extends a framework for dynamic…
Cells generally convert nutrient resources to useful products via energy transduction. Accordingly, the thermodynamic efficiency of this conversion process is one of the most essential characteristics of living organisms. However, although…
This paper presents a conceptual model describing the medium and long-term co-evolution of natural and socio-economic subsystems of Earth. An economy is viewed as an out-of-equilibrium dissipative structure that can only be maintained with…
The process of protein folding from an unfolded state to a biologically active, folded conformation is governed by many parameters e.g the sequence of amino acids, intermolecular interactions, the solvent, temperature and chaperon…
Living cells use readout molecules to record the state of receptor proteins, similar to measurements or copies in typical computational devices. But is this analogy rigorous? Can cells be optimally efficient, and if not, why? We show that,…
We outline a phenomenological theory of evolution and origin of life by combining the formalism of classical thermodynamics with a statistical description of learning. The maximum entropy principle constrained by the requirement for…
In the theoretical modelling of a physical system a crucial step consists in the identification of those degrees of freedom that enable a synthetic, yet informative representation of it. While in some cases this selection can be carried out…
A multiscale theory of interacting continuum mechanics and thermodynamics of mixtures of fluids, electrodynamics, polarization and magnetization is proposed. The mechanical (reversible) part of the theory is constructed in a purely…
Organisms have evolved a variety of mechanisms to cope with the unpredictability of environmental conditions, and yet mainstream models of metabolic regulation are typically based on strict optimality principles that do not account for…
The metabolism is the motor behind the biological complexity of an organism. One problem of characterizing its large-scale structure is that it is hard to know what to compare it to. All chemical reaction systems are shaped by the same…