相关论文: Harvesting chemical power from cyclic environments

Recent experimental studies suggest that wet-dry cycles and coexisting phases can each strongly alter chemical processes. The mechanisms of why and to which degree chemical processes are altered when subject to evaporation and condensation…

Living systems efficiently use chemical fuel to do work, process information, and assemble patterns despite thermal noise. Whether high efficiency arises from general principles or specific fine-tuning is unknown. Here, applying a recent…

Under temperature oscillation, cyclic molecular machines such as catalysts and enzymes could harness energy from the oscillatory bath and use it to drive other processes. Using a novel geometrical approach, under fast temperature…

Can we objectively distinguish chemical systems that are able to process meaningful information from those that are not suitable for information processing? Here, we present a formal method to assess the semantic capacity of a chemical…

In living cells, molecular motors convert chemical energy into mechanical work. Its thermodynamic energy efficiency, i.e. the ratio of output mechanical work to input chemical energy, is usually high. However, using two-state models, we…

Microbes require several complex organic molecules for growth. A species may obtain a required factor by taking up molecules released by other species or by synthesizing the molecule. The patterns of uptake and synthesis set a flow of…

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…

Molecular motors transduce chemical energy obtained from hydrolizing ATP into mechanical work exerted against an external force. We calculate their efficiency at maximum power output for two simple generic models and show that the…

It is becoming widely accepted that very early in the origin of life, even before the emergence of genetic encoding, reaction networks of diverse small chemicals might have manifested key properties of life, namely self-propagation and…

Our planet is roughly closed to matter, but open to energy input from the sun. However, to harness this energy, organisms must transform matter from one chemical (redox) state to another. For example, photosynthetic organisms can capture…

Understanding how biological homochirality emerged remains a challenge for the researchers interested in the origin of life. During the last decades, stable non-racemic steady states of nonequilibrium chemical systems have been discussed as…

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…

Maximizing the amount of work harvested from an environment is important for a wide variety of biological and technological processes, from energy-harvesting processes such as photosynthesisto energy storage systems such as fuels and…

We propose an alternative to the prevailing two origin of life narratives, one based on a replicator first hypothesis, and one based on a metabolism first hypothesis. Both hypotheses have known difficulties: All known evolvable molecular…

We consider the efficiency of chemical energy extraction from the environment by the growth of a copolymer made of two constituent units in the entropy-driven regime. We show that the thermodynamic nonlinearity associated with the…

We propose a simple theoretical model for a molecular chemical engine that catalyzes a chemical reaction and converts the free energy released by the reaction into mechanical work. Binding and unbinding processes of reactant and product…

This paper considers the capacity of a diffusion-based molecular communication link assuming the receiver uses chemical reactions. The key contribution is we show that enzymatic reaction cycles, which is a class of chemical reactions…

Routinely navigating through an ever-changing and unsteady environment, and utilizing chemical energy, molecular motors transport the cell's crucial components, such as neurotransmitters and organelles. They generate force and pull cargo,…

Metabolic scaling is one of the most important patterns in biology. Theory explaining the 3/4-power size-scaling of biological metabolic rate does not predict the non-linear scaling observed for smaller life forms. Here we present a new…

Information molecules play a crucial role in molecular communication (MC), acting as carriers for information transfer. A common approach to get information molecules in MC involves harvesting them from the environment; however, the…