Related papers: Life's mechanism
Darwinian Theory depicts life as being overwhelmingly consumed by a fight for survival in a hostile environment. However, from a thermodynamic perspective, life is a dynamic, out of equilibrium process, stabilizing and coevolving in concert…
Living systems self-organize in ways that conventional physical frameworks-based on forces, energies, and continuous fields-cannot fully capture. Processes like gene regulation and cellular decision-making involve rule-based logic and…
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…
There has been on-going philosophical debate on whether artificial life models, also known as digital organisms, are truly alive. The main difficulty appears to be finding an encompassing and definite definition of life. By examining…
The cells and tissues that make up our body juggle contradictory mechanical demands. It is crucial for their survival to be able to withstand large mechanical loads, but it is equally crucial for them to produce forces and actively change…
The origin of cellular life can be described in terms of the transition from inorganic matter: solids, liquids and gases, to the emergence of cooperative assemblies of organic matter, DNA and proteins,capable of replication and metabolism.…
Metabolism displays striking and robust regularities in the forms of modularity and hierarchy, whose composition may be compactly described. This renders metabolic architecture comprehensible as a system, and suggests the order in which…
It is probably not a coincidence that two of the pioneers of thermodynamics, Helmholtz and Mayer, were physicians. Thermodynamics studies the transformations of energy, and such transformations ceaselessly take place in all living systems…
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…
Many of life's most fascinating phenomena emerge from interactions among many elements--many amino acids determine the structure of a single protein, many genes determine the fate of a cell, many neurons are involved in shaping our thoughts…
The sequence of nucleotide bases occurring in an organism's DNA is often regarded as a codescript for its construction. However, information in a DNA sequence can only be regarded as a codescript relative to an operational biochemical…
Gene expression is a central process to any form of life. It involves multiple temporal and functional scales that extend from specific protein-DNA interactions to the coordinated regulation of multiple genes in response to intracellular…
Single-molecule biophysics has transformed our understanding of the fundamental molecular processes involved in living biological systems, but also of the fascinating physics of life. Far more exotic than a collection of exemplars of soft…
One of the important challenges facing high resolution molecular dynamics calculations is to reproduce biological functions that occur in the macroscopic world and involve macroscopic variables. Some of these functions can be well described…
Even when concepts similar to emergence have been used since antiquity, we lack an agreed definition. However, emergence has been identified as one of the main features of complex systems. Most would agree on the statement ``life is…
We study the statistical underpinnings of life. We question some common assumptions about the thermodynamics of life and illustrate how, contrary to widespread belief, even in a closed system entropy growth can accompany an increase in…
The question "What is life?" has been asked and studied by the researchers of various fields. Nevertheless, no global theory which unified various aspects of life has been proposed so far. Considering that the physical principle for the…
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…
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…
Cells with the same genome can exist in different phenotypes. and can change between distinct phenotypes when subject to specific stimuli and microenvironments. Some examples include cell differentiation during development, reprogramming…