|
Dear FIS
people, As a new
comer to Systems Biology and graduated in Chemical Engineering, I can
say
little (and understand only a little bit) about the fluctuon model. May
I say
that personally I find far more interesting the pioneering ideas of M.
Conrad
on molecular bio-computing, which were also inspired by his “vertical”
view of
the information flows. "Proteins and other
macromolecules may be viewed as shape-based (or tactile)
pattern recognizers. Biological cells exploit this inherent capability
by
transducing macroscopic signal patterns impinging on the external
membrane to
microscopic patterns at the molecular level, via second messengers. The
parallelism inherent in the wave function description of these
microscale
processes in effect serves to increase the computing power of molecular
computing systems as compared to macroscopic analogs. The conversion
and
recognition process is highly reminiscent of measurement. The linking
role of
second messengers allows macroscopic signals to set the state of the
cell (in
analogy to state preparation), while enzymatic readout and control of
cellular
behavior is an amplification process that corresponds to measurement of
the
microstate at a later point of time. Since the standard time evolution
equations are reversible and unitary, while measurement is not, it is
conceivable that the study of molecular computing will lead to new
insights
into the relation between the microworld and the macroworld. The model
presented suggests that projection processes that are masked in
ordinary
laboratory systems are brought to macroscopic significance by the
highly
nonlinear chain of amplification events in the biological cell." Quantum
mechanics and molecular computing: Mutual implications
--  |
_______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
