Related papers: The selfish ribosome
The light-driven reactions of photosynthesis, as well as the mitochondrial power supply, are hosted within specialized membranes containing a high fraction of redoxactive lipids. Protein mobility and diffusion of redox lipids is believed to…
Life evolved organisms to adapt dynamically to their environment and autonomously exhibit behaviours. While complex behaviours in organisms are typically associated with the capability of neurons to process information, the unicellular…
Across the tree of life, populations have evolved the capacity to contend with suboptimal conditions by engaging in dormancy, whereby individuals enter a reversible state of reduced metabolic activity. The resulting seed banks are complex,…
Living cells use readout molecules to record the state of receptor proteins, similar to measurements or copies in typical computational devices. But is this analogy rigorous? Can cells be optimally efficient, and if not, why? We show that,…
The origin of cellular life can be described in terms of the transition from inorganic matter: solids, liquids and gases, to the emergence of cooperative assemblies of organic matter, DNA and proteins,capable of replication and metabolism.…
Free will is an old philosophical enigma that has been recently revived by neuropsychology. We restrict ourselves to the problem that determinism seems to allow only an illusion of freedom but random decissions do not contain any freedom…
Proteins are large and complex molecular machines. In order to perform their function, most of them need energy, e.g. either in the form of a photon, like in the case of the visual pigment rhodopsin, or through the breaking of a chemical…
Aging remains a fundamental open problem in modern biology. Although there exist a number of theories on aging on the cellular scale, nearly nothing is known about how microscopic failures cascade to macroscopic failures of tissues, organs…
Patterns and forms adopted by Nature, such as the shape of living cells, the geometry of shells and the branched structure of plants, are often the result of simple dynamical paradigms. Here we show that a growing self-interacting string…
Information is increasingly being viewed as a resource used by organisms to increase their fitness. Indeed, it has been formally shown that there is a sensible way to assign a reproductive value to information and it is non-negative.…
The minimal requirements for life are autopoiesis and cognition. We propose autopoietic models with cognition and perform three classes of evolutionary simulation. In our models the plasticity of the metabolic cycle and the regulation…
Protein expression levels optimize cell fitness: Too low an expression level of essential proteins will slow growth by compromising essential processes; whereas overexpression slows growth by increasing the metabolic load. This trade-off…
Recently discovered simple quantitative relations, known as bacterial growth laws, hint on the existence of simple underlying principles at the heart of bacterial growth. In this work, we provide a unifying picture on how these known…
Silicon has striking similarity with carbon and is found in plant cells. However, there is no specific role that has been assigned to silicon in the life cycle of plants. The amount of silicon in plant cells is species specific and can…
The interplay of membrane proteins is vital for many biological processes, such as cellular transport, cell division, and signal transduction between nerve cells. Theoretical considerations have led to the idea that the membrane itself…
Selected ribonucleotide sequences bind well to zwitterionic phospholipid bilayer membranes, though randomized RNAs do not. There are no evident repeated sequences in selected membrane binding RNAs. This implies small and varied motifs…
Apoptosis is a mechanism of programmed cell death in which cells engage in a controlled demolition and prepare to be digested without damaging their environment. In normal conditions apoptosis is repressed, until it is irreversibly induced…
The complex physicochemical structures and chemical reactions in living organism have some common features: (1) The life processes take place in the cytosol in the cells, which, from a physicochemical point of view is an emulsion of…
We study two mechanisms for the formation of protein patterns near membranes of living cells by mathematical modelling. Self-assembly of protein domains by electrostatic lipid-protein interactions is contrasted with self-organization due to…
The prevalence of sexual reproduction ("sex") in eukaryotes is an enigma of evolutionary biology. Sex increases genetic variation only tells its long-term superiority in essence. The accumulation of harmful mutations causes an immediate and…