Related papers: Why life is hot
Species or population that proliferate faster than others become dominant in numbers. Catalysis allows catalytic sets within a molecular reaction network to dominate the non catalytic parts of the network by processing most of the available…
As few real systems comprise indistinguishable units, diversity is a hallmark of nature. Diversity among interacting units shapes properties of collective behavior such as synchronization and information transmission. However, the benefits…
The biomechanics of the human body allow humans a range of possible ways of executing movements to attain specific goals. Nevertheless, humans exhibit significant patterns in how they execute movements. We propose that the observed patterns…
Enzymes are on the front lines of evolution. All living organisms rely on highly efficient, specific enzymes for growth, sustenance, and reproduction; and many diseases are a consequence of a mutation on an enzyme that affects its catalytic…
Apparent biodiversity on earth exists only if we compare different species separated from their environments. Meanwhile coexisting species have to be identical in terms of energetic interactions. Consider the biosphere as a network of…
Different evolutionary models are known to make disparate predictions for the success of an invading mutant in some situations. For example, some evolutionary mechanics lead to amplification of selection in structured populations, while…
Microbial communities display extreme diversity. A variety of strains or species coexist even when limited by a single resource. It has been argued that metabolite secretion creates new niches and facilitates such diversity. Nonetheless, it…
Mammals have a high metabolism that produces heat proportionally to the power 3/4 of their mass at rest. Any excess of heat has to be dissipated in the surrounding environment to prevent overheating. Most of that dissipation occurs through…
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…
We consider evolution of a large population, where fitness of each organism is defined by many phenotypical traits. These traits result from expression of many genes. We propose a new model of gene regulation, where gene expression is…
In order to grow in any given environment, bacteria need to collect information about the medium composition and implement suitable growth strategies by adjusting their regulatory and metabolic degrees of freedom. In the standard sense,…
A previously established multiscale population genetics model states that fitness can be inferred from the physical properties of proteins under the physiological assumption that a loss of stability by any protein confers the lethal…
The high accuracy exhibited by biological information transcription processes is due to kinetic proofreading, i.e., by a mechanism which reduces the error rate of the information-handling process by driving it out of equilibrium. We provide…
Living systems regulate many aspects of their behavior through periodic oscillations of molecular concentrations, which function as `biochemical clocks.' These clocks are intrinsically subject to thermal fluctuations, so that the duration…
Unlike many physical nonequilibrium systems, in biological systems, the coupling to external energy sources is not a fixed parameter but adaptively controlled by the system itself. We do not have theoretical frameworks that allow for such…
Integrated global food system analysis is hampered by the fragmentation of data among food types, processes, and scales. Studies also often neglect the connection to human metabolism -- the ultimate driver of food demand. Here we use a…
Cells are often considered input-output devices that maximize the transmission of information by converting extracellular stimuli (input) via signaling pathways (communication channel) to cell behavior (output). However, in biological…
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…
If life is sustained by a process of photosynthesis, not necessarily the same existing on Earth, the surface temperature of the star and the orbit of the host planet cannot be whatsoever. In fact the global life cycle, no matter how…
The identification of cellular objectives is one of the central topics in the research of microbial metabolic networks. In particular, the information about a cellular objective is needed in flux balance analysis which is a commonly used…