Related papers: Charting dissipation across the microbial world
Aging is a universal consequence of life, yet researchers have identified no universal theme. This manuscript considers aging from the perspective of entropy, wherein things fall apart. We first examine biological information change as a…
What makes living things special is how they manage matter, energy, and entropy. A general theory of organismal metabolism should therefore be quantified in these three currencies while capturing the unique way they flow between individuals…
The more we learn about the cytoplasm of cells, the more we realise that the cytoplasm is not uniform but instead is highly inhomogeneous. In any inhomogeneous solution, there are concentration gradients, and particles move either up or…
We demonstrate and characterize a first-principles approach to modeling the mass action dynamics of metabolism. Starting from a basic definition of entropy expressed as a multinomial probability density using Boltzmann probabilities with…
Production of energy (metabolism) and its distribution is vital for living organisms, both at individual level - between different functions of an organism, as well as between species of communities at different organizational levels,…
A new statistical model for the combined effects of decoherence, energy redistribution and dissipation on electron transport in large quantum systems is introduced. The essential idea is to consider the electron phase information to be lost…
We present a theoretical study of the heat dissipation in single-molecule junctions. In order to investigate the heat dissipation in the electrodes and the relationship between the transmission spectra and the electronic structures, we…
The glassy cytoplasm, crowded with bio-macromolecules, is fluidized in living cells by mechanical energy derived from metabolism. Characterizing the living cytoplasm as a non-equilibrium system is crucial in elucidating the intricate…
The biological world, especially its majority microbial component, is strongly interacting and may be dominated by collective effects. In this review, we provide a brief introduction for statistical physicists of the way in which living…
The size and composition distribution of an ensemble of aqueous organic droplets, evolving via nucleation and concomitant chemical aging, may be affected by the latent heat of condensation and enthalpy of heterogeneous chemical reactions,…
The question of characterization of the degree of non-equilibrium activity in active matter systems is studied in the context of a stochastic microswimmer model driven by a chemical cycle. The resulting dynamical properties and entropy…
Phase separation and transitions among different molecular states are ubiquitous in living cells. Such transitions can be governed by local equilibrium thermodynamics or by active processes controlled by biological fuel. It remains largely…
The thermal diffusion of a free particle is a random process and generates entropy at a rate equal to twice the particle temperature in natural units of information per second. The rate is calculated using a Gaussian process with a variance…
The process of evolution by natural selection leads to phenotypes of increasing fitness. For cellular chemical reaction networks, this means optimising a variety of fitness functions such as robustness, precision, or sensitivity to external…
Every time a chemical reaction occurs, an energy exchange between reactants and environment exists, which is defined as the enthalpy of the reaction. In the last decades, research has resulted in an increasing number of devices at the…
There does not exist a general positive correlation between important life-supporting properties and the entropy production rate. The simple reason is that nondissipative and time-symmetric kinetic aspects are also relevant for establishing…
We evaluate entropy production in a photovoltaic cell that is modeled by four electronic levels resonantly coupled to thermally populated field modes at different temperatures. We use a formalism recently proposed, the so-called multiple…
It has been proposed that during the early steps in the origin of life, small droplets could have formed via the segregation of molecules from complex mixtures by phase separation. These droplets could have provided chemical reaction…
The concept of entropy has been pivotal in the formulation of thermodynamics. For systems driven away from thermal equilibrium, a comparable role is played by entropy production and dissipation. Here we provide a comprehensive picture how…
Natural selection has shaped the evolution of cells and multi-cellular organisms such that social cooperation can often be preferred over an individualistic approach to metabolic regulation. This paper extends a framework for dynamic…