Related papers: The selfish ribosome
Living tissues experience various external forces on cells, influencing their behaviour, physiology, shape, gene expression, and destiny through interactions with their environment. Despite much research done in this area, challenges remain…
Metabolic reactions of single-cell organisms are routinely observed to become dispensable or even incapable of carrying activity under certain circumstances. Yet, the mechanisms as well as the range of conditions and phenotypes associated…
Molecular chaperones are machines that consume copious amount of ATP to drive misfolded proteins or RNA to fold into functionally competent native states. Because the folding landscapes of biomolecules with complex native state topology are…
The origin and development of consciousness is poorly understood. Although it is clearly a naturalistic phenomenon evolved through Darwinian evolution, explaining it in terms of physicochemical, neural, or symbolic mechanisms remains…
Concepts rooted in physics are becoming increasingly important in biology as we transition to an era in which quantitative descriptions of all processes from molecular to cellular level are needed. In this essay I discuss two unexpected…
This paper presents a real-time simulation involving ''protozoan-like'' cells that evolve by natural selection in a physical 2D ecosystem. Selection pressure is exerted via the requirements to collect mass and energy from the surroundings…
Understanding protein self-assembly is important for many biological and industrial processes. Proteins can self-assemble into crystals, filaments, gels, and other amorphous aggregates. The final forms include virus capsids and condensed…
Through extensive studies of dynamical system modeling cellular growth and reproduction, we find evidence that complexity arises in multicellular organisms naturally through evolution. Without any elaborate control mechanism, these systems…
Life is an exergonic chemical reaction. Many individual reactions in metabolism entail slightly endergonic steps that are coupled to free energy release, typically as ATP hydrolysis, in order to go forward. ATP is almost always supplied by…
The immune system is a highly parallel and distributed intelligent system which has learning, memory, and associative capabilities. Artificial Immune System is an evolutionary paradigm inspired by the biological aspects of the immune system…
I propose to treat the biological evolution of genoms by means of quantum mechanical tools. We start with the concept of meta- gene, which specifies the "selfish gene" of R.Dawkins. Meta- gene encodes the abstract living unity, which can…
This paper proposes an original theory of aging of multicellular organisms. The cells of multicellular organisms, in contrast to unicellular organisms, are burdened with a two- part genome: housekeeping and specialized (multicellular),…
Biological systems exploit self-assembly to create complex structures whose arrangements are finely controlled from molecular to mesoscopic level. Herein we report an example of using fully synthetic systems that mimic two levels of…
Inside every living cell is the cytoplasm: a fluid mixture of thousands of different macromolecules, predominantly proteins. This mixture is where most of the biochemistry occurs that enables living cells to function, and it is perhaps the…
Autophagy is a conserved biological stress response in mammalian cells that is responsible for clearing damaged proteins and organelles from the cytoplasm and recycling their contents via the lysosomal pathway. In cases of mild stress,…
Protein synthesis is one of the most fundamental biological processes, which consumes a significant amount of cellular resources. Despite existence of multiple mathematical models of translation, varying in the level of mechanistical…
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…
Cellular life requires the presence of a set of biochemical mechanisms in order to maintain a predictable process of growth and division. Several attempts have been made towards the building of minimal protocells from a top-down approach,…
$\beta$-cells are biologically essential for humans and other vertebrates. Because their functionality arises from cell-cell interactions, they are also a model system for collective organization among cells. There are currently two…
Much of biology (and, indeed, all of science) is becoming increasingly computational. We tend to think of this in regards to algorithmic approaches and software tools, as well as increased computing power. There has also been a shift…