相关论文: Harvesting chemical power from cyclic environments

Chemically active droplets provide simple models for cell-like systems that can grow and divide. Such active droplet systems are driven away from thermodynamic equilibrium and turn over chemically, which corresponds to a simple metabolism.…

Deep generative models have been shown powerful in generating novel molecules with desired chemical properties via their representations such as strings, trees or graphs. However, these models are limited in recommending synthetic routes…

By developing and leveraging an explicit molecular realisation of a measurement-and-feedback-powered Szilard engine, we investigate the extraction of work from complex environments by minimal machines with finite capacity for memory and…

Living systems continuously transform matter and energy through the chemical processes that constitute their metabolism. The overall metabolic rate of an organism correlates positively with its body mass, however both the exact scaling…

Environmentally-powered computer systems operate on renewable energy harvested from their environment, such as solar or wind, and stored in batteries. While harvesting environmental energy has long been necessary for small-scale embedded…

Conventional heat engines typically require two distinct thermal reservoirs, with their efficiency strictly bounded by the Carnot limit. We present a theoretical design for a phase-change heat engine that utilizes water as the working fluid…

Recent developments in synthetic and supramolecular chemistry have created opportunities to design organic systems with tailored nanoscale structure for various technological applications. A key application area is the capture of light…

Life occurs in concentrated `Ringer Solutions' derived from seawater that Lesser Blum studied for most of his life. As we worked together, Lesser and I realized that the questions asked of those solutions were quite different in biology…

At odds with a traditional view of molecular evolution that seeks a descent-with-modification relationship between functional sequences, new functions can emerge {\it de novo} with relative ease. At early times of molecular evolution,…

Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has long been an area of substantial interest to ecologists because most fundamental biological processes, such as protein synthesis and respiration, are inherently energy-consuming. Microbial communities are…

Biochemical networks are used in computational biology, to model the static and dynamical details of systems involved in cell signaling, metabolism, and regulation of gene expression. Parametric and structural uncertainty, as well as…

The unique ability of chaotic advection under micro-scale confinement to direct chemical processes along accelerated kinetic pathways has long been recognized. But practical applications have been slow to emerge because optimal results are…

A fundamental goal of microbial ecology is to understand what determines the diversity, stability, and structure of microbial ecosystems. The microbial context poses special conceptual challenges because of the strong mutual influences…

Synthetic biology aims at designing modular genetic circuits that can be assembled according to the desired function. When embedded in a cell, a circuit module becomes a small subnetwork within a larger environmental network, and its…

The molecular network in an organism consists of transcription/translation regulation, protein-protein interactions/modifications and a metabolic network, together forming a system that allows the cell to respond sensibly to the multiple…

Biological functions in each animal cell depend on coordinated operations of a wide variety of molecular motors. Some of the these motors transport cargo to their respective destinations whereas some others are mobile workshops which…

Catalysis, the acceleration of chemical reactions by molecules that are not consumed in the process, is essential to living organisms but currently absent in physical systems that aspire to emulate biological functionalities with artificial…

In a diffusion-based molecular communication system, molecules are employed to convey information. When propagation and reception processes are considered in a framework of first passage processes, we need to focus on absorbing receivers.…

In many scientific fields, there is an interest in understanding the way in which complex chemical networks evolve. The chemical networks which researchers focus upon, have become increasingly complex and this has motivated the development…

Electric circuits manipulate electric charge and magnetic flux via a small set of discrete components to implement useful functionality over continuous time-varying signals represented by currents and voltages. Much of the same…