Related papers: Evolutionary Analysis of Biological Excitability
We present a simple one-dimensional trapping model prompted by the problem of ion current across biological membranes. The trap is modeled mimicking the ionic channel membrane behaviour. Such voltage-sensitive channels are open or closed…
The non-selective voltage activated cation channel from the human red cells, which is activated at depolarizing potentials, has been shown to exhibit counter-clockwise gating hysteresis. We have analyzed the phenomenon with the simplest…
Photosynthesis is arguably the fundamental process of Life, since it enables energy from the Sun to enter the food-chain on Earth. It is a remarkable non-equilibrium process in which photons are converted to many-body excitations which…
The increasing volume of ecologically and biologically relevant data has revealed a wide collection of emergent patterns in living systems. Analyzing different datasets, ranging from metabolic gene-regulatory to species interaction…
Biological membranes are capacitors that can be charged by applying a field across the membrane. The charges on the capacitor exert a force on the membrane that leads to electrostriction, i.e. a thinning of the membrane. Since the force is…
Natural evolution has produced a tremendous diversity of functional organisms. Many believe an essential component of this process was the evolution of evolvability, whereby evolution speeds up its ability to innovate by generating a more…
A recurrent idea in the study of complex systems is that optimal information processing is to be found near bifurcation points or phase transitions. However, this heuristic hypothesis has few (if any) concrete realizations where a standard…
Transport of molecules across membrane channels is investigated theoretically using exactly solvable discrete stochastic site-binding models. It is shown that the interaction potential between molecules and the channel has a strong effect…
Ion channels are important proteins for physiological information transfer and functional control. To predict the microscopic origins of their voltage-conductance characteristics, we here applied dissipation-corrected targeted Molecular…
Suspensions of swimming micro-organisms provide examples of coordinated active dynamics. That has stimulated the study of a phenomenological theory combining synchronization and polar order in active matter. Here, we consider another…
Data for voltage-activation of a potassium channel (Matulef et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 110: 17886-17891. 2013) were, as conventionally done, fitted by the authors by a Boltzmann function, i.e. by a curvilinear profile. Reanalysis of the…
Motility is an essential factor for an organism's survival and diversification. With the advent of novel single-cell technologies, analytical frameworks and theoretical methods, we can begin to probe the complex lives of microscopic motile…
Active fluctuations are detected in a growing number of systems due to self-propulsion mechanisms or collisions with active environment. They drive the system far from equilibrium and can induce phenomena which at equilibrium states are…
Electrostatic interaction between ions in an ionic channel and the charge fluctuations in the channel mouth are considered. It is shown that the charge fluctuations can be enhanced in the channels with low dielectric constant and result in…
Based on the derivation of the macroscopic Maxwell's equations by spatial averaging of the microscopic equations, we discuss the electrophysiology of living organs. Other methods of averaging (or homogenization) like the bidomain model are…
We discovered a dynamic phase transition induced by sexual reproduction. The dynamics is a pure Darwinian rule with both fundamental ingredients to drive evolution: 1) random mutations and crossings which act in the sense of increasing the…
What features characterise complex system dynamics? Power laws and scale invariance of fluctuations are often taken as the hallmarks of complexity, drawing on analogies with equilibrium critical phenomena[1-3]. Here we argue that slow,…
To unveil the logic of cell from a level of chemical reaction dynamics, we need to clarify how ensemble of chemicals can autonomously produce the set of chemical, without assuming a specific external control echanism. A cell consists of a…
We live within an increasingly technological, information-laden environment for the first time in human evolution.This subjects us, and will continue to subject us in an accelerating fashion, to an unremitting exposure to meaningful…
Electrostatic interactions involving proteins depend not just on the ionic charges involved but also on their chemical identities. Here we examine the origins of incompletely understood differences in the strength of association of…