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Reciprocally-Coupled Gating: Strange Loops in Bioenergetics, Genetics, and Catalysis

Bioenergetics, genetic coding, and catalysis are all difficult to imagine emerging without pre-existing historical context. That context is often posed as a “Chicken and Egg” problem; its resolution is concisely described by de Grasse Tyson: “The egg was laid by a bird that was not a chicken”. The c...

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Autores principales: Carter, Charles W., Wills, Peter R.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7916928/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33670192
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/biom11020265
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author Carter, Charles W.
Wills, Peter R.
author_facet Carter, Charles W.
Wills, Peter R.
author_sort Carter, Charles W.
collection PubMed
description Bioenergetics, genetic coding, and catalysis are all difficult to imagine emerging without pre-existing historical context. That context is often posed as a “Chicken and Egg” problem; its resolution is concisely described by de Grasse Tyson: “The egg was laid by a bird that was not a chicken”. The concision and generality of that answer furnish no details—only an appropriate framework from which to examine detailed paradigms that might illuminate paradoxes underlying these three life-defining biomolecular processes. We examine experimental aspects here of five examples that all conform to the same paradigm. In each example, a paradox is resolved by coupling “if, and only if” conditions for reciprocal transitions between levels, such that the consequent of the first test is the antecedent for the second. Each condition thus restricts fluxes through, or “gates” the other. Reciprocally-coupled gating, in which two gated processes constrain one another, is self-referential, hence maps onto the formal structure of “strange loops”. That mapping uncovers two different kinds of forces that may help unite the axioms underlying three phenomena that distinguish biology from chemistry. As a physical analog for Gödel’s logic, biomolecular strange-loops provide a natural metaphor around which to organize a large body of experimental data, linking biology to information, free energy, and the second law of thermodynamics.
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spelling pubmed-79169282021-03-01 Reciprocally-Coupled Gating: Strange Loops in Bioenergetics, Genetics, and Catalysis Carter, Charles W. Wills, Peter R. Biomolecules Review Bioenergetics, genetic coding, and catalysis are all difficult to imagine emerging without pre-existing historical context. That context is often posed as a “Chicken and Egg” problem; its resolution is concisely described by de Grasse Tyson: “The egg was laid by a bird that was not a chicken”. The concision and generality of that answer furnish no details—only an appropriate framework from which to examine detailed paradigms that might illuminate paradoxes underlying these three life-defining biomolecular processes. We examine experimental aspects here of five examples that all conform to the same paradigm. In each example, a paradox is resolved by coupling “if, and only if” conditions for reciprocal transitions between levels, such that the consequent of the first test is the antecedent for the second. Each condition thus restricts fluxes through, or “gates” the other. Reciprocally-coupled gating, in which two gated processes constrain one another, is self-referential, hence maps onto the formal structure of “strange loops”. That mapping uncovers two different kinds of forces that may help unite the axioms underlying three phenomena that distinguish biology from chemistry. As a physical analog for Gödel’s logic, biomolecular strange-loops provide a natural metaphor around which to organize a large body of experimental data, linking biology to information, free energy, and the second law of thermodynamics. MDPI 2021-02-11 /pmc/articles/PMC7916928/ /pubmed/33670192 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/biom11020265 Text en © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Review
Carter, Charles W.
Wills, Peter R.
Reciprocally-Coupled Gating: Strange Loops in Bioenergetics, Genetics, and Catalysis
title Reciprocally-Coupled Gating: Strange Loops in Bioenergetics, Genetics, and Catalysis
title_full Reciprocally-Coupled Gating: Strange Loops in Bioenergetics, Genetics, and Catalysis
title_fullStr Reciprocally-Coupled Gating: Strange Loops in Bioenergetics, Genetics, and Catalysis
title_full_unstemmed Reciprocally-Coupled Gating: Strange Loops in Bioenergetics, Genetics, and Catalysis
title_short Reciprocally-Coupled Gating: Strange Loops in Bioenergetics, Genetics, and Catalysis
title_sort reciprocally-coupled gating: strange loops in bioenergetics, genetics, and catalysis
topic Review
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7916928/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33670192
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/biom11020265
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