Related papers: Quantitative Measurement of Heritability in the Pr…
Life on earth is distinguished by long-lived correlations in time. The patterns of material organization that characterize living organisms today are contingent on events that occurred billions of years ago. This contingency is a necessary…
Many examples of cooperation exist in biology. In chemical systems however, which can sometimes be quite complex, we do not appear to observe intricate cooperative interactions. A key question for the origin of life, is then how can…
The origin of heredity is studied as a recursive state in a replicating proto-cell consisting of many molecule species in mutually catalyzing reaction networks. Protocells divide when the number of molecules, increasing due to replication,…
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…
The emergence of self-replication and information transmission in life's origin remains unexplained despite extensive research on the topic. A hypothesis explaining the transition from a simple organic world to a complex RNA world is…
The improbability of a spontaneously generated self-assembling molecule has suggested that life began with a set of simpler, collectively replicating elements, such as an enclosed autocatalytic set of polymers (or protocell). Since…
Self-replicability is the unique attribute observed in all the living organisms and the question how the life was physically initiated could be equivalent to the question how self-replicating informative polymers were formed in the abiotic…
Living systems transmit heritable information using the replicating gene sequences and the cycling regulators assembled around gene sequences. Here I develop a framework for heredity and development that includes the cycling regulators…
Self-organization is a fundamental process of complex biological systems, particularly during the early stages of development. In the mammalian embryo, blastocyst formation exemplifies a self-organized system, involving the correct…
Complexity Theory is highly interdisciplinary, therefore any regularities must hold on all levels of organization, independent on the nature of the system. An open question in science is how complex systems self-organize to produce emergent…
Living organisms have some common structures, chemical reactions and molecular structures. The organisms consist of cells with cell division, they have homochirality of protein and carbohydrate units, and metabolism, and genetics, and they…
The hierarchical organisation of cell identity is a fundamental feature of animal development with rich and well-characterized experimental phenomenology, yet the mechanisms driving its emergence remain unknown. The regulation of cell…
Cell fate determination, the process through which cells commit to differentiated states is commonly mediated by gene regulatory motifs with mutually exclusive expression states. The classical deterministic picture for cell fate…
The RNA World hypothesis predicts that self-replicating RNAs evolved before DNA genomes and coded proteins. Despite widespread support for the RNA World, self-replicating RNAs have yet to be identified in a natural context, leaving a key…
Species or population that proliferate faster than others become dominant in numbers. Catalysis allows catalytic sets within a molecular reaction network to dominate the non catalytic parts of the network by processing most of the available…
An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a…
Can prelife proceed without cell division? A recently proposed mechanism suggests that transient compartmentalization could have preceded cell division in prebiotic scenarios. Here, we study transient compartmentalization dynamics in the…
An important transition after the origin of life was the first emergence of a Darwinian population, self-reproducing entities exhibiting differential reproduction, phenotypic variation, and inheritance of phenotypic traits. The simplest…
Self-organization is the autonomous assembly of a network of interacting components into a stable, organized pattern. This article shows that the process of self-assembly can be encoded in terms of evolutionary entropy, a statistical…
A dynamic model for cell differentiation is studied, where cells with internal chemical reaction dynamics interact with each other and replicate. It leads to spontaneous differentiation of cells and determination, as is discussed in the…