Related papers: Life's mechanism
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…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
We study analytically and numerically a model metabolic cycle composed of an arbitrary number of species of catalytically active particles. Each species converts a substrate into a product, the latter being used as the substrate by the next…
The living organism is considered as an open system, whereas Prigogine's approach to the thermodynamics of such systems is used. The approach allows one to formulate the law of individual growth and development (ontogenesis) of the living…
A novel model of biological organisms is advanced, treating an organism as a self-consistent system subject to a pathogen flux. The principal novelty of the model is that it describes not some parts, but a biological organism as a whole.…
Living organisms are not just random collections of organic molecules. There is continuous information processing going on in the apparent bouncing around of molecules of life. Optimisation criteria in this information processing can be…
The path toward the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required…
One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…
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…
Physical emergence - crystals, rocks, sandpiles, turbulent eddies, planets, stars - is fundamentally different from biological emergence - amoeba, cells, mice, humans - even though the latter is based in the former. This paper points out…
Living organisms are molecular systems with self-sustained dynamics via energy conversion through molecular cooperation, resulting in highly complex macroscopic behaviors. Construction of such autonomous macroscopic dynamics at a molecular…
At odds with a traditional view of molecular evolution that seeks a descent-with-modification relationship between functional sequences, new functions can emerge {\it de novo} with relative ease. At early times of molecular evolution,…
This is my attempt to answer Schr\"odinger's question: "What is Life?". In living cell the local combination of atoms is reproduced with incredible accuracy. In the case of protein biosynthesis the notion of the physical aspect of the…
From a purely operational standpoint, the existence of microbes that can grow under extreme conditions, or "extremophiles", leads to the question of how the molecules making up these microbes can maintain both their structure and function.…
The classification of life should be based upon the fundamental mechanism in the evolution of life. We found that the global relationships among species should be circular phylogeny, which is quite different from the common sense based upon…
In higher organisms, all cells share the same genome, but every cell expresses only a limited and specific set of genes that defines the cell type. During cell division, not only the genome, but also the cell type is inherited by the…
Biological systems reach organizational complexity that far exceeds the complexity of any known inanimate objects. Biological entities undoubtedly obey the laws of quantum physics and statistical mechanics. However, is modern physics…
Many cellular processes involve information processing and decision making. We can probe these processes at increasing molecular detail. The analysis of heterogeneous data remains a challenge that requires new ways of thinking about cells…
We present a simple physical model that recapitulates several features of biological evolution, while being based only on thermally-driven attachment and detachment of elementary building blocks. Through its dynamics, this model samples a…
The term active matter describes diverse systems, spanning macroscopic (e.g. shoals of fish and flocks of birds) to microscopic scales (e.g. migrating cells, motile bacteria and gels formed through the interaction of nanoscale molecular…