相关论文: Harvesting chemical power from cyclic environments

Active matter constantly dissipates energy to power the self-propulsion of its microscopic constituents. This opens the door to designing innovative cyclic engines without any equilibrium equivalent. We offer a consistent thermodynamic…

Deep generative models are able to suggest new organic molecules by generating strings, trees, and graphs representing their structure. While such models allow one to generate molecules with desirable properties, they give no guarantees…

The activity of biological cells is primarily based on chemical reactions and typically modeled as a reaction-diffusion system. Cells are, however, highly crowded with macromolecules, including a variety of molecular machines such as…

In a molecular communication network, transmitters may encode information in concentration or frequency of signalling molecules. When the signalling molecules reach the receivers, they react, via a set of chemical reactions or a molecular…

All life, including cells and artificial protocells, must integrate diverse molecules into a single unit in order to reproduce. Despite expected pressure to evolve a simple system with the fastest replication speed, the mechanism by which…

Metabolic networks perform some of the most fundamental functions in living cells, including energy transduction and building block biosynthesis. While these are the best characterized networks in living systems, understanding their…

Phase transitions, such as the freezing of water and the magnetisation of a ferromagnet upon lowering the ambient temperature, are familiar physical phenomena. Interestingly, such a collective change of behaviour at a phase transition is…

Biomolecular machines consume free energy to break symmetry and make directed progress. Nonequilibrium ATP concentrations are the typical free energy source, with one cycle of a molecular machine consuming a certain number of ATP, providing…

Non-Markovian effects in the evolution of open quantum systems have recently attracted widespread interest, particularly in the context of assessing the efficiency of energy and charge transfer in nanoscale biomolecular networks and quantum…

It has been suggested that major transitions in evolution require the emergence of novelties, often associated to the cooperative behaviour of previously existing objects or agents. A key innovation involves the first cooperative…

For understanding the origin of life, it is essential to explain the development of a compartmentalized structure, which undergoes growth and division, from a set of chemical reactions. In this study, a hypercycle with two chemicals that…

Many examples of cooperation exist in biology. In chemical systems however, which can sometimes be quite complex, we do not appear to observe intricate cooperative interactions. A key question for the origin of life, is then how can…

In molecular communications, the direct detection of signaling molecules may be challenging due to a lack of suitable sensors and interference in the environment. Motivated by research in molecular biology, we investigate an indirect…

An equilibrium reversible cycle with a certain engine to transduce the energy of any chemical reaction into mechanical energy is proposed. The efficiency for chemical energy transduction is also defined so as to be compared with Carnot…

Biological transport is supported by collective dynamics of enzymatic molecules that are called motor proteins or molecular motors. Experiments suggest that motor proteins interact locally via short-range potentials. We investigate the…

The multifarious internal workings of organisms are difficult to reconcile with a single feature defining a state of being alive. Indeed, definitions of life rely on emergent properties (growth, capacity to evolve, agency) only symptomatic…

Successful adaptation helped the emergence of complexity. Alternating plastic- and rigid-like states were recurrently considered to play a role in adaptive processes. However, this extensive knowledge remained fragmented. In this paper I…

A cyclically operating chemical engine is considered that converts chemical energy into mechanical work. The working fluid is a gas of finite-sized spherical particles interacting through elastic hard collisions. For a generic transport law…

Microbial communities assemble through a complex set of interactions between microbes and their environment, and the resulting metabolic impact on the host ecosystem can be profound. Microbial activity is known to impact human health, plant…

Metabolism displays striking and robust regularities in the forms of modularity and hierarchy, whose composition may be compactly described. This renders metabolic architecture comprehensible as a system, and suggests the order in which…