Life’s Thermodynamics: Cells and Evolution
A special issue of International Journal of Molecular Sciences (ISSN 1422-0067). This special issue belongs to the section "Physical Chemistry and Chemical Physics".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 April 2025 | Viewed by 30
Special Issue Editor
Interests: frozen dough; dough; glutens; biofilms; microfluidics; hyperbolic partial differential equations; antioxidant; phenoxy radical; scavenging
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Although classical and statistical thermodynamics do not explicitly consider the structure of matter, the laws and principles of these disciplines find a number of applications to case studies where specific molecules and processes at the molecular level play a pivotal role. Thermodynamics of irreversible processes has opened up to include systems far from equilibrium that evolve along definite paths and produce dissipative structures at molecular and macroscopic levels. Further evolution of the theoretical basis has led to practices popular today, such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Emergy and Exergy Analysis, which account for the feedback loops within irreversible processes and bridge molecular processes with ecology.
Living systems host a number of irreversible processes, at intra- and intercellular levels, which concur, through complex feedback loops, to the overall phenomenon of life. A major example concerns microorganisms, either pro- or eukaryotic, that show adaptive behaviors to cope with the conditions of the surrounding environment and are able to improve their own fitness and even undergo genomic mutations, generating the so-called growth phenotypes that survive in extreme environmental conditions and are resistant to antibiotic drugs. Based on this perspective, microbial cultures look like self-regulating complex systems that “plan” the growth and the decay of the microbial population. Such phenomenological evidence has emerged thanks to the ability of cells to acquire free energy from the surrounding environment, toward which they release thermal energy, which sounds familiar to thermodynamic ears.
Similar effects govern the physiologic and pathological status of vegetal and animal organisms. For example, some peculiar structures of animal DNA, like telomers, seem to regulate cellular aging. Their shrinking comes with a decrease in cellular fitness and takes place in the course of several cell duplication steps. A thermodynamic description of this process could pave the way toward pharmacological and clinical treatments. The same holds for a number of molecular processes, already known on an experimental basis, which still lacks a theoretical description.
This Special Issue of IJMS aims to collate papers that emphasize research lines devoted to applications of thermodynamics that can shed light on chemical and biochemical processes responsible for the evolution of living systems and studies that deal with applications of the thermodynamics of irreversible processes that underlie the enhancement of the fitness of living organisms.
Both original article and review contributions are welcome to be submitted.
Prof. Dr. Alberto Schiraldi
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- cell growth and decay
- cell aging
- system biology
- mathematical modeling
- ecological modeling
- dissipative adaptation
- maximum power principle
- evolution of microbial fitness
- energy balance in microbial cultures
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