Related papers: Life's mechanism
The dynamics of molecular collisions in a macroscopic body are encoded by the parameter Thermodynamic entropy - a statistical measure of the number of molecular configurations that correspond to a given macrostate. Directionality in the…
Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how…
Our planet is roughly closed to matter, but open to energy input from the sun. However, to harness this energy, organisms must transform matter from one chemical (redox) state to another. For example, photosynthetic organisms can capture…
Biological systems exhibit large-scale self-organized dynamics and structures which enable organisms to perform the functions of life. The field of active matter strives to develop and understand microscopically-driven nonequilibrium…
Measurement in biological systems became a subject of concern as a consequence of numerous reports on limited reproducibility of experimental results. To reveal origins of this inconsistency, we have examined general features of biological…
Redox biology underpins signalling, metabolism, immunity, and adaptation, yet lacks a unifying theoretical framework capable of formalising structure, function, and dynamics. Current interpretations rely on descriptive catalogues of…
The sustenance of life depends on the high degree of organization that prevails through different levels of living organisms, from subcellular structures such as biomolecular complexes and organelles to tissues and organs. The physical…
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…
Biochemical oscillations are prevalent in living organisms. Systems with a small number of constituents cannot sustain coherent oscillations for an indefinite time because of fluctuations in the period of oscillation. We show that the…
Phase transitions, such as the freezing of water and the magnetisation of a ferromagnet upon lowering the ambient temperature, are familiar physical phenomena. Interestingly, such a collective change of behaviour at a phase transition is…
Biofilms are complex, self-organized consortia of microorganisms that produce a functional, protective matrix of biomolecules. Physically, the structure of a biofilm can be described as an entangled polymer network which grows and changes…
Living cells must control the reading out or "expression" of information encoded in their genomes, and this regulation often is mediated by transcription factors--proteins that bind to DNA and either enhance or repress the expression of…
Motility is characteristic of life, but a common basis for movement has remained to be identified. Diverse systems in motion shift between two states depending on interactions that turnover at the rate of an applied cycle of force. Although…
In a cell or microorganism the processes that generate mass, energy, information transfer, and cell fate specification are seamlessly integrated through a complex network of various cellular constituents and reactions. However, despite the…
We axiomatize the molecular-biology reasoning style, show compliance of the standard reference: Ptashne, A Genetic Switch, and present proof-theory-induced technologies to help infer phenotypes and to predict life cycles from genotypes. The…
While ubiquitous, energy redistribution remains a poorly understood facet of the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of biomolecules. At the molecular level, finite-size effects, pronounced nonlinearities, and ballistic processes produce behavior…
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 origin of life is often approached through the lens of replication, heredity, or molecular specificity. This paper proposes a thermodynamic framework in which the emergence of life is driven by the persistence of reaction pathways that…
``The purpose of life is to obtain knowledge, use it to live with as much satisfaction as possible, and pass it on with improvements and modifications to the next generation.'' This may sound philosophical, and the interpretation of words…
Metabolic networks perform some of the most fundamental functions in living cells, including energy transduction and building block biosynthesis. While these are the best characterized networks in living systems, understanding their…