相关论文: Erwin Schroedinger, Francis Crick and epigenetic s…
2019 marked the 75th anniversary of the publication of Erwin Schr\"{o}dinger's "What is Life?", a short book described by Roger Penrose in his preface to a reprint of this classic as "among the most influential scientific writings of the…
The esteemed physicist Erwin Schroedinger, whose name is associated with the most notorious equation of quantum mechanics, also wrote a brief essay entitled 'What is Life?', asking: 'How can the events in space and time which take place…
We study the statistical underpinnings of life. We question some common assumptions about the thermodynamics of life and illustrate how, contrary to widespread belief, even in a closed system entropy growth can accompany an increase in…
There have been many claims that quantum mechanics plays a key role in the origin and/or operation of biological organisms, beyond merely providing the basis for the shapes and sizes of biological molecules and their chemical affinities.…
We dwell upon the physicist's conception of `life' since Schroedinger and Wigner through to the modern-day language of living systems in the light of quantum information. We discuss some basic features of a living system such as ordinary…
We study stochastic evolution equations describing the dynamics of open quantum systems. First, using resolvent approximations, we obtain a sufficient condition for regularity of solutions to linear stochastic Schroedinger equations driven…
This paper proposes a systemic perspective for some aspects of both phylogenesis and ontogenesis, in the light of the notion of biological organization as negative entropy, following some hints by Schroedinger. To this purpose, we introduce…
Cells often exhibit different and stable phenotypes from the same DNA sequence. Robustness and plasticity of such cellular states are controlled by diverse transcriptional and epigenetic mechanisms, among them the modification of…
The aim of this essay is to analyze the role of quantum mechanics as an inherent characteristic of life. During the last ten years the problem of the origin of life has become an innovative research subject approached by many authors. The…
Epigenetics has captured the attention of scientists in the past decades, yet its scope has been continuously changing. In this paper, we give an overview on how and why its definition has evolved and suggest several clarification on the…
Erwin Schrodinger famously and presciently ascribed the vehicle transmitting the hereditary information underlying life to an `aperiodic crystal'. We compare and contrast this, only later discovered to be stored in the linear biomolecule…
While noise is generally associated with uncertainties and often has a negative connotation in engineering, living organisms have evolved to adapt to (and even exploit) such uncertainty to ensure the survival of a species or implement…
The dynamic instability of the living systems and the "superposition" of different forms of randomness are viewed as a component of the contingently increasing organization of life along evolution. We briefly survey how classical and…
We establish an analogy between the Fokker-Planck equation describing evolutionary landscape dynamics and the Schr\"{o}dinger equation which characterizes quantum mechanical particles, showing how a population with multiple genetic traits…
The molecular biology revolution of the last seventy five years has transformed our view of living systems. Scientific explanations of biological phenomena are now synonymous with the identification of the genes, proteins, and signaling…
The question "What is life?" has been asked and studied by the researchers of various fields. Nevertheless, no global theory which unified various aspects of life has been proposed so far. Considering that the physical principle for the…
We study the exponential stability of evolutionary equations. The focus is laid on second order problems and we provide a way to rewrite them as a suitable first order evolutionary equation, for which the stability can be proved by using…
Cells can often choose among several stably heritable phenotypes. Examples are the expression of genes in eukaryotic cells where long chromosomal regions can adopt persistent and heritable silenced or active states, that may be associated…
I consider the many ways in which evolved information-flows are restricted and metabolic resources protected and hidden -- the thesis of living phenomena as evolutionary cryptosystems. I present the information theory of secrecy systems and…
Understanding the spatial organisation of the genome in the cell nucleus is one of the current grand challenges in biophysics. Certain biochemical -- or epigenetic -- marks that are deposited along the genome are thought to play an…