Related papers: A Prerequisite for Life
Partitioning of (bio)materials in polymeric mixtures is a key phenomenon both in cellular environments, as well as in industrial applications. In cells, several macromolecules are suspended within different biomolecular phases. On the other…
Biomolecules can be synthesized in interstellar ice grains subject to UV radiation and cosmic rays. I show that on time scales of $\gtrsim 10^{6}$ years, these processes lead to the formation of large percolation clusters of organic…
Soil is a complex, dynamic material, with physical properties that depend on its biological content. We propose a cellular automaton model for self-organizing soil structure, where soil aggregates and serves as food for microbial species.…
Biomolecular condensates constitute a newly recognized form of spatial organization in living cells. Although many condensates are believed to form as a result of phase separation, the physicochemical properties that determine the phase…
Biomolecules composed of a limited set of chemical building blocks can co-localize into distinct, spatially segregated compartments known as biomolecular condensates. While many condensates are known to form spontaneously via phase…
Protocells are supposed to have played a key role in the self-organizing processes leading to the emergence of life. Existing models either (i) describe protocell architecture and dynamics, given the existence of sets of collectively…
Basic problems in complex systems are surveyed in connection with Life. As a key issue for complex systems, complementarity between syntax/rule/parts and semantics/behavior/whole is stressed. To address the issue, a constructive approach…
The reproduction of a living cell requires a repeatable set of chemical events to be properly coordinated. Such events define a replication cycle, coupling the growth and shape change of the cell membrane with internal metabolic reactions.…
Chemical surfactants are omnipresent in consumers' products but they suffer from environmental concerns. For this reason, complete replacement of petrochemical surfactants by biosurfactants constitute a holy grail but this is far from…
From multicellular tissues to bacterial colonies, three dimensional cellular structures arise through the interaction of cellular activities and mechanical forces. Simple bacterial communities provide model systems for analyzing such…
Planets form and obtain their compositions in disks of gas and dust around young stars. The chemical compositions of these planet-forming disks regulate all aspects of planetary compositions from bulk elemental inventories to access to…
Organic material in anoxic sediment represents a globally significant carbon reservoir that acts to stabilize Earth's atmospheric composition. The dynamics by which microbes organize to consume this material remain poorly understood. Here…
The emergence of biomolecular homochirality is a critical open question in the field of origins of life. In order to seek out an answer to this unsettled issue, a number of mechanisms have been offered over time, but it still remains a…
Many mechanisms, functions and structures of life have been unraveled. However, the fundamental driving force that propelled chemical evolution and led to life has remained obscure. The 2nd law of thermodynamics, written as an equation of…
The molecular machinery of life is largely created via self-organisation of individual molecules into functional assemblies. Minimal coarse-grained models, where a whole macromolecule is represented by a small number of particles, can be of…
Molecular chirality is inherent to biology and cellular chemistry. In this report, the origin of enantiomeric selectivity is analyzed from the viewpoint of the "RNA World" model, based on the autocatalytic self-replication of glyceraldehyde…
Classical thermodynamics and statistical mechanics describe systems in which nothing interacts with nothing. Even the highly refined theory of simple fluids does not deal very well with electrical interactions, boundary conditions, or…
Pasteur has demonstrated that the chiral components in a racemic mixture can separate in homochiral crystals. But with a strong chiral discrimination the chiral components in a concentrated mixture can also phase separate into homochiral…
We propose an alternative to the prevailing two origin of life narratives, one based on a replicator first hypothesis, and one based on a metabolism first hypothesis. Both hypotheses have known difficulties: All known evolvable molecular…
Many biological processes can be thought of as the result of an underlying dynamics in which the system repeatedly undergoes distinct and abortive trajectories with the dynamical process only ending when some specific process, purpose,…