Related papers: The selfish ribosome
In many social mammals, early life social adversity and social integration largely predict individual health, lifespan and reproductive success. Efforts in identifying the physiological mechanisms mediating the relationship between the…
Ribosomes are critical biomolecular nanomachines responsible for protein synthesis in all known organisms. The function and dynamics of ribosomes can be studied using molecular dynamics computer simulations. Although this task remains…
The hierarchical organisation of cell identity is a fundamental feature of animal development with rich and well-characterized experimental phenomenology, yet the mechanisms driving its emergence remain unknown. The regulation of cell…
Darwin's theory of evolution emphasized that positive selection of functional proficiency provides the fitness that ultimately determines the structure of life, a view that has dominated biochemical thinking of enzymes as perfectly…
Translation is an important process for prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells to produce necessary proteins for cell growth. Numerious experiments have been performed to explore the translational properties. Diverse models have also been…
The problem of unicellular-multicellular transition is one of the main issues that is discussing in evolutionary biology. In [1] the fitness of a colony of cells is considered in terms of its two basic components, viability and fecundity.…
A great variety of molecular components is encapsulated in cells. Each of these components is replicated for cell reproduction. To address an essential role of the huge diversity of cellular components, we study a model of protocells that…
Consciousness is presented not as a unified and uniquely human characteristic, but rather as an emergent property of several building blocks, most of which are demonstrably present in other species. Each block has its own rationale under…
Self-replicability is the unique attribute observed in all the living organisms and the question how the life was physically initiated could be equivalent to the question how self-replicating informative polymers were formed in the abiotic…
Gene expression and its regulation is a nonequilibrium stochastic process. Different molecules are involved in several biochemical steps in this process with low copies. It is observed that the stochasticity in biochemical processes is…
Most of the DNA that composes a complex organism is non-coding and defined as junk. Even the coding part is composed of genes that affect the phenotype differently. Therefore, a random mutation has an effect on the specimen fitness that…
A host-parasite model is considered for a population of cells that can be of two types, A or B, and exhibits unilateral reproduction: while a B-cell always splits into two cells of the same type, the two daughter cells of an A-cell can be…
Self-assembly processes are widespread in nature, and lie at the heart of many biological and physical phenomena. The characteristics of self-assembly building blocks determine the structures that they form. Two crucial properties are the…
According to the universally accepted concept of the development of life on the Earth, multicellular organisms initially emerged as a result of either the union of identical unicellular organisms with the following functional…
The production processes of proteins in prokaryotic cells are investigated. Most of the mathematical models in the literature study the production of {\em one} fixed type of proteins. When several classes of proteins are considered, an…
Eukaryotic cells are often exposed to fluctuations in growth conditions as well as endogenous and exogenous stress-related agents. In addition, during development global patterns of gene transcription change dramatically, and these changes…
Genetic circuits need a cellular environment to operate in, which naturally couples the circuit function with the overall functionality of gene regulatory network. To execute their functions all gene circuits draw resources in the form of…
Biological cells self-organize into living materials that uniquely blend structure with functionality and responsiveness to the environment. The integration of similar life-like features in man-made materials remains challenging, yet…
The lengths of the telomere regions of chromosomes in a population of cells are modelled using a chemical master equation formalism, from which the evolution of the average number of cells of each telomere length is extracted. In…
Proteins are polymerized by cyclic machines called ribosome which use their messenger RNA (mRNA) track also as the corresponding template and the process is called translation. We explore, in depth and detail, the stochastic nature of the…