The principle of coherence in multi-level brain information processing.

Synchronisation has become one of the major scientific tools to explain biological order at many levels of organisation. In systems neuroscience, synchronised subthreshold and suprathreshold oscillatory neuronal activity within and between distributed neuronal assemblies is acknowledged as a fundamental mode of neuronal information processing. Coherent neuronal oscillations correlate with all basic cognitive functions, mediate local and long-range neuronal communication and affect synaptic plasticity.

The role of coherence in a systems view of cancer development.

Theories of cancer origin are going through a paradigm shift, opening cancer research to new hypotheses. Accumulating evidence from the tissue microenvironment research, from bioenergetics, epigenetics, systems biology and thermodynamics tends to converge in characterising cancer as essentially a genetically non-deterministic disease. Instead, it is characterised by progressive disorganisation at a variety of organisational levels, from the genome and metabolic networks, to tissue integrity.

On the origin of cancer: can we ignore coherence?

A growing number of inconsistencies have accumulated within the genetically deterministic paradigm of the origin of cancer. Among them the most important are the nonspecific nature of cancer mutations and the non-cell-autonomous factors of cancer initiation and progression. Epigenetic aspects of cancer and cancer systems biology represent novel approaches to cancer aetiology and converge in the notion that cancer is characterized by a nonspecific progressive destabilization of multiple molecular pathways.