相关论文: Coevolution of membranes and channels: A possible …
In biology, the evolution of increasingly cooperative groups has shaped the history of life. Genes collaborate in the control of cells; cells efficiently divide tasks to produce cohesive multicellular individuals; individual members of…
This note presents a minimal approach to the origin of life, following standard ideas. We pay special attention to the point of view of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, and in particular to detailed balance. As a consequence we…
Understanding the thermodynamic function of life may shed light on its origin. Life, as are all irreversible processes, is contingent on entropy production. Entropy production is a measure of the rate of the tendency of Nature to explore…
In a recent paper [1] Lineweaver and Davis performed a statistical analysis to claim that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth indicates high probability of biogenesis on terrestrial- type planets. We argue that the rapid appearance of life…
A variety of models for the membrane-mediated interaction of particles in lipid membranes, mostly well-established in theoretical physics, is reviewed from a mathematical perspective. We provide mathematically consistent formulations in a…
Protocells are supposed to have played a key role in the self-organizing processes leading to the emergence of life. Existing models either (i) describe protocell architecture and dynamics, given the existence of sets of collectively…
The thermodynamic dissipation theory for the origin of life asserts a thermodynamic imperative for the origin of life, suggesting that the fundamental molecules of life originated as self-organized molecular photon dissipative structures…
While all organisms on Earth descend from a common ancestor, there is no consensus on whether the origin of this ancestral self-replicator was a one-off event or whether it was only the final survivor of multiple origins. Here we use the…
In this work we propose a physical model of organismal evolution, where phenotype, organism life expectancy, is directly related to genotype i.e. the stability of its proteins which can be determined exactly in the model. Simulating the…
Understanding the (de)mixing behavior of multicomponent lipid bilayers is an important step towards unraveling the nature of spatial composition heterogeneities in cellular membranes and their role in biological function. We use…
The complex physicochemical structures and chemical reactions in living organism have some common features: (1) The life processes take place in the cytosol in the cells, which, from a physicochemical point of view is an emulsion of…
The rise of multicellularity in the early evolution of life represents a major challenge for evolutionary biology. Guidance for finding answers has emerged from disparate fields, from phylogenetics to modelling and synthetic biology, but…
The emergence of life from inanimate matter presents a thermodynamic challenge: the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates a global trend towards disorder, yet life constitutes localized pockets of profound organization. This paper presents…
Biomolecular condensates constitute a newly recognized form of spatial organization in living cells. Although many condensates are believed to form as a result of phase separation, the physicochemical properties that determine the phase…
Compartments are ubiquitous throughout biology, yet their importance stretches back to the origin of cells. In the context of origin of life, we assume that a protocell, a compartment enclosing functional components, requires $N$ components…
In this article, we attempt to convince the reader that the origin of life was such an exceptionally unlikely event that it probably has never occurred elsewhere. This involves an explicit calculation using the laws of physics which, while…
We show that the formation of membrane tubes (or membrane tethers), which is a crucial step in many biological processes, is highly non-trivial and involves first order shape transitions. The force exerted by an emerging tube is a…
The biological molecules delivered to Earth on the board of meteorites and comets were called one of the possible causes of the origin of life. Therefore, our understanding of the routes of formation of biomolecules in space should shed the…
Membrane bending is an extensively studied problem from both modeling and experimental perspectives because of the wide implications of curvature generation in cell biology. Many of the curvature generating aspects in membranes can be…
The sequence of nucleotide bases occurring in an organism's DNA is often regarded as a codescript for its construction. However, information in a DNA sequence can only be regarded as a codescript relative to an operational biochemical…