Is it possible to understand the very nature of 'Life' and 'Death' based on contemporary biology? The usual spontaneous reaction is: "No way. Life is far too complicated. It involves both material- and an immaterial dimensions, and this combination exceeds the capacities of the human brain." In this paper, a fully contrarian stand is taken. Indeed it will be shown that without invoking any unknown principle(s) unambiguous definitions can be logically deduced. The key? First ask the right questions. Next, thoroughly imbue contemporary biology with the principles of communication, including both its 'hardware' and its 'software' aspects. An integrative yet simple principle emerges saying that: 1. All living matter is invariably organized as sender-receiver compartments that incessantly handle and transfer information (= communicate); 2. The 'communicating compartment' is better suited to serve as universal unit of structure, function and evolution than 'the (prokaryotic) cell', the smallest such unit; 3. 'Living matter' versus 'non-living' are false opposites while 'still alive' and 'just not alive anymore' are true opposites; 4. 'Death' ensues when a given sender-receiver compartment irreversibly loses its ability to handle information at its highest level of compartmental organization; 5. The verb 'Life' (L) denotes nothing else than the total sum (∑) of all acts of communication (C) executed by a sender-receiver at all its levels of compartmental organization: L = ∑C; 6. Any act of communication is a problem-solving act; 6. Any Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) should have the definition of Life at its core.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19420889.2015.1059977 | DOI Listing |
Acc Chem Res
January 2025
Department of Chemistry, McGill University, 801 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Quebec H3A 0B8, Canada.
ConspectusStructural DNA nanotechnology offers a unique self-assembly toolbox to construct soft materials of arbitrary complexity, through bottom-up approaches including DNA origami, brick, wireframe, and tile-based assemblies. This toolbox can be expanded by incorporating interactions orthogonal to DNA base-pairing such as metal coordination, small molecule hydrogen bonding, π-stacking, fluorophilic interactions, or the hydrophobic effect. These interactions allow for hierarchical and long-range organization in DNA supramolecular assemblies through a DNA-minimal approach: the use of fewer unique DNA sequences to make complex structures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntrinsically disordered arginine-glycine (RG) repeat domains are enriched in multilayered biomolecular condensates such as the nucleolus. nucleolar RG repeats are dispensable for nucleolar accumulation and instead contribute to the organization of sub-nucleolar compartments. The sufficiency of RG repeats to facilitate sub-nucleolar compartmentalization is unclear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBMC Plant Biol
January 2025
Key Laboratory of Crop Physiology, Ecology and Genetic Breeding, Ministry of Education, College of Agronomy, Jiangxi Agricultural University, Nanchang, 330045, China.
Sci China Life Sci
December 2024
Clinical and Translational Research Center of Shanghai First Maternity & Infant Hospital, Frontier Science Center for Stem Cells, School of Life Sciences and Technology, Tongji University, Shanghai, 200092, China.
Inflammation is a driving force of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) aging, causing irreversible exhaustion of functional HSCs. However, the underlying mechanism of HSCs erosion by inflammatory insult remains poorly understood. Here, we find that transient LPS exposure primes aged HSCs to undergo accelerated differentiation at the expense of self-renewal, leading to depletion of HSCs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNat Commun
January 2025
Biomimetic Systems for Cell Engineering Laboratory, Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST), Barcelona, Spain.
Intestinal epithelial cells are segregated into proliferative crypts and differentiated regions. This organization relies on specific signals, including Wnt3a, which regulates cell proliferation within crypts, and Eph/Ephrin, which dictates cell positioning along the crypt-villus axis. However, studying how the spatial distributions of these signals influences crypt-villus organization is challenging both in vitro and in vivo.
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