Related papers: Red herrings and rotten fish
Metabolic allometry, a common pattern in nature, is a close-to-3/4-power scaling law between metabolic rate and body mass in organisms, across and within species. An analogous relationship between metabolic rate and water volume in river…
Life has a special status, it even has its own science: biology. In many ways, the logic of life seems to differ from that of atoms, molecules, planets, or any other `inanimate object'. However, life is increasingly measured using…
Growth patterns of complex systems predict how they change in sizes, numbers, masses, etc. Understanding growth is important, especially for many biological, ecological, urban, and socioeconomic systems. One noteworthy growth behavior is…
Biological systems are modular, and this modularity evolves over time and in different environments. A number of observations have been made of increased modularity in biological systems under increased environmental pressure. We here…
Life systems are complex and hierarchical, with diverse components at different scales, yet they sustain themselves, grow, and evolve over time. How can a theory of such complex biological states be developed? Here we note that for a…
We present significantly advanced studies of the previously introduced physical growth mechanism and unite it with biochemical growth factors. Obtained results allowed formulating the general growth law which governs growth and evolutional…
We propose a whole-body model of the metabolism in man as well as a generalized approach for modeling metabolic networks. Using this approach, we are able to write a large metabolic network in a systematic and compact way. We demonstrate…
We propose a discrete model to determine the metabolic scaling exponent based on Fibonacci growth patterns and discrete biological development phases. In contrast to continuous fractal models such as the West-Brown-Enquist (WBE) theory, the…
The metabolism is the motor behind the biological complexity of an organism. One problem of characterizing its large-scale structure is that it is hard to know what to compare it to. All chemical reaction systems are shaped by the same…
Two basic features of assemblages of unicellular plankton: (1) their high biodiversity and (2) the power-law structure of their abundance, can be explained by an allometric scaling of cell growth and mortality with respect to cell size. To…
Kinetic modeling of microbial growth is essential for the design, optimization, and scale-up of industrial bioprocesses. Classical empirical models often lack biologically interpretable parameters or fail to capture complex multiphasic…
Obesity does not emerge abruptly; rather, it develops gradually over extended periods. The gradual progression often prevents early recognition of physiological changes until excess adiposity is established. A common belief is that weight…
Nonadiabatic corrections in molecules composed of a few atoms are considered. It is demonstrated that a systematic perturbative expansion around the adiabatic solution is possible, with the expansion parameter being the electron-nucleus…
Organisms have evolved a variety of mechanisms to cope with the unpredictability of environmental conditions, and yet mainstream models of metabolic regulation are typically based on strict optimality principles that do not account for…
An extensive rewiring of cell metabolism supports enhanced proliferation in cancer cells. We propose a systems level approach to describe this phenomenon based on Flux Balance Analysis (FBA). The approach does not explicit a cell biomass…
Ordered chains (such as chains of amino acids) are ubiquitous in biological cells, and these chains perform specific functions contingent on the sequence of their components. Using the existence and general properties of such sequences as a…
Life presents fascinating examples of self-organization and emergent phenomena. In multi-cellular organisms, a multitude of cells interact to form and maintain highly complex body plans of well-defined size. In this thesis, we investigate…
The mean size of exponentially dividing E. coli cells cultured in different nutrient conditions is known to depend on the mean growth rate only. However, the joint fluctuations relating cell size, doubling time and individual growth rate…
Aging is a multifactorial process and a key factor of morbidity and mortality. Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an age-related disorder and a main cause of worldwide disability. Both aging and AD can be characterized by metabolic dysfunction.…
We review the current status of theoretical predictions for mixing quantities and lifetimes in the $B$-sector. In particular, due to the first non-zero measurement of the decay rate difference in the neutral $B_s$-system, $\Delta \Gamma_s/…