Related papers: Reciprocal Nucleopeptides as the Ancestral Darwini…
The activation-polymerization-epimerization-depolymerization (APED) model of Plasson et al. has recently been proposed as a mechanism for the evolution of homochirality on prebiotic Earth. The dynamics of the APED model in two-dimensional…
In this work we develop a microscopic physical model of early evolution, where phenotype,organism life expectancy, is directly related to genotype, the stability of its proteins in their native conformations which can be determined exactly…
A normative approach called Similarity Matching was recently introduced for deriving and understanding the algorithmic basis of neural computation focused on unsupervised problems. It involves deriving algorithms from computational…
The folding of a polypeptide is an example of the cooperative effects of the amino-acid residues. Of recent interest is how a secondary structure, such as a helix, spontaneously forms during the collapse of a peptide from an initial…
A system of replicators with Hebbian random couplings is studied using dynamical methods. The self-reproducing species are here characterized by a set of binary traits and interact based on complementarity. In the case of an extensive…
The macromolecules that encode and translate information in living systems, DNA and RNA, exhibit distinctive structural asymmetries, including homochirality or mirror image asymmetry and $3' - 5'$ directionality, that are invariant across…
This work concerns a many-body deterministic model that displays life-like properties as emergence, complexity, self-organization, spontaneous compartmentalization, and self-regulation. The model portraits the dynamics of an ensemble of…
The E.coli transcription network has an essentially feedforward structure, with, however, abundant feedback at the level of self-regulations. Here, we investigate how these properties emerged during evolution. An assessment of the role of…
The function of protein, RNA, and DNA is modulated by fast, dynamic exchanges between three-dimensional conformations. Conformational sampling of biomolecules with exact and nullspace inverse kinematics, using rotatable bonds as revolute…
We propose a generative model termed Deciphering Autoencoders. In this model, we assign a unique random dropout pattern to each data point in the training dataset and then train an autoencoder to reconstruct the corresponding data point…
The transformation of organic molecules into the simplest self-replicating living system,a microorganism, is accomplished from a unique event or rare events that occurred early in the Universe. The subsequent dispersal on cosmic scales and…
The design of a biodegradable, environmentally friendly surfactant is carried out, taking the structure of a known surfactant that lacks these qualities as the starting point, using mesoscopic computer simulations. The newly designed…
Cross-reactions and other systematic issues generated by the coupling of functional chemical subsystems pose the largest challenge for assembling a viable protocell in the laboratory. Our current work seeks to identify and clarify such key…
The issues we attempt to tackle here are what the first peptides did look like when they emerged on the primitive earth, and what simple catalytic activities they fulfilled. We conjecture that the early functional peptides were short (3 to…
DNA replication fidelity is a critical issue in molecular biology. Biochemical experiments have provided key insights on the mechanism of fidelity control by DNAP in the past decades, whereas systematic theoretical studies on this issue…
The central dogma of molecular biology is the principal framework for understanding how nucleic acid information is propagated and used by living systems to create complex biomolecules. Here, by integrating the structural and dynamic…
Genome-wide protein-protein interaction (PPI) data are readily available thanks to recent breakthroughs in biotechnology. However, PPI networks of extant organisms are only snapshots of the network evolution. How to infer the whole…
The most prominent property of life on Earth is its ability to evolve. It is often taken for granted that self-replication--the characteristic that makes life possible--implies evolvability, but many examples such as the lack of…
Natural proteins fold to a unique, thermodynamically dominant state. Modeling of the folding process and prediction of the native fold of proteins are two major unsolved problems in biophysics. Here, we show successful all-atom ab initio…
Two recent streams of work suggest that pairwise interactions may be sufficient to capture the complexity of biological systems ranging from protein structure to networks of neurons. In one approach, possible amino acid sequences in a…