Related papers: Why life is hot
Maximizing the amount of work harvested from an environment is important for a wide variety of biological and technological processes, from energy-harvesting processes such as photosynthesisto energy storage systems such as fuels and…
We consider the efficiency of chemical energy extraction from the environment by the growth of a copolymer made of two constituent units in the entropy-driven regime. We show that the thermodynamic nonlinearity associated with the…
Kinetic proofreading mechanisms explain the extraordinary accuracy observed in central biological events in terms of the enhanced specificity of substrate selection networks under a nonequilibrium environment. The nonequilibrium steady…
Life relies on a sophisticated metabolic molecular machinery that turns over high-energy molecules to evolve complex macromolecules and assemblies. At the molecular origin of life, such machinery was absent, implying the need for simple yet…
In the end of the second decade of 20th century, Warburg showed how cancer cells present a fermentative respiration process, related to a metabolic injury. Here, we develop an analysis of the cell process based on its heat outflow, in order…
A theory of aging based on the principles of the kinetics of chemical reactions and the rules of natural selection of organisms is proposed. The theory is based on a hypothesis that the biochemical processes in the organism can be described…
Understanding the organization of reaction fluxes in cellular metabolism from the stoichiometry and the topology of the underlying biochemical network is a central issue in systems biology. In this task, it is important to devise reasonable…
Competition between individuals drives the evolution of whole species. Although the fittest individuals survive the longest and produce the most offspring, in some circumstances the resulting species may not be optimally fit. Here, using…
The interplay between energy efficiency and evolutionary mechanisms is addressed. One important question is how evolutionary mechanisms can select for the optimised usage of energy in situations where it does not lead to immediate…
Advances in experimental techniques enable the precise manipulation of a large variety of active systems, which constantly dissipate energy to sustain nonequilibrium phenomena without any equilibrium equivalent. To design novel materials…
The dynamics of microbial communities is incredibly complex, determined by competition for metabolic substrates and cross-feeding of byproducts. Species in the community grow by harvesting energy from chemical reactions that transform…
Behavior in the context of game theory is described as a natural process that follows the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The rate of entropy increase as the payoff function is derived from statistical physics of open systems. The thermodynamic…
The living cell expends energetic and material resources to reliably process information from its environment. To do so, it utilises unreliable molecular circuitry that is subject to thermal and other fluctuations. Here, we argue that…
Cooperation is a persistent behavioral pattern of entities pooling and sharing resources. Its ubiquity in nature poses a conundrum. Whenever two entities cooperate, one must willingly relinquish something of value to the other. Why is this…
One essential ingredient of evolutionary theory is the concept of fitness as a measure for a species' success in its living conditions. Here, we quantify the effect of environmental fluctuations onto fitness by analytical calculations on a…
Complex biological systems are very robust to genetic and environmental changes at all levels of organization. Many biological functions of Escherichia coli metabolism can be sustained against single-gene or even multiple-gene mutations by…
Selection shapes all kinds of behaviors, including how we make decisions under uncertainty. The risk attitude reflected from it should be simple, flexible, yet consistent. In this paper we engaged evolutionary dynamics to find the decision…
Micro-calorimetry offers significant potential as a quantitative method for studying the structure and function of biological systems, for instance, by probing the excess heat released by cellular or sub-cellular structures, isothermal or…
Evolution depends on the fitness of organisms, the expected rate of reproducing. Directly getting offspring is the most basic form of fitness, but fitness can also be increased indirectly by helping genetically related individuals (such as…
We analyze a reaction-diffusion system describing the growth of microbial species in a model of flocculation type that arises in biology. Existence of global classical positive solutions is proved under general growth assumptions, with…