Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 10
The Living Cell
The living cell is the unit of life. Therefore, without knowing how the cell works on
the molecular level, it would be difficult to understand how embryos develop or
how species evolve (Waddington 1957; Gerhart and Kirschner 1997; West-
Eberhard 2003). Most experimental data on the living cell have been obtained
from “dead” cells, since living cells must be destroyed in order to isolate their
cells (
dissipatons
) work based on the experimental data measured from “dead” cells
(
equilibrons
), however complete, is not an easy task, just as reconstructing musical
melodies from sheet music would not be easy if one does not know the rules of
mapping sheet music to audio music or does not have the ability to sing from sheet
music. It is probably fair to say that, despite the massive amount of experimental
data on the cell that has accumulated in the literature and on the World Wide Web
as of the first decade of the twenty-first century, we still do not understand how the
myriad structural components of the cell interact in space and time to exhibit the
dynamic phenomena we recognize as life on the cellular level. The major goal of
this topic is to propose, in the form of a model of the living cell called the
Bhopalator (Fig.
2.11
), the theoretical concepts, molecular mechanisms, and phys-
icochemical laws and principles that may facilitate uncovering the rules that map
cell structures to cell functions.
10.1 The Bhopalator: A Molecular Model of the Living Cell
Although it had been known since the mid-nineteenth century that the cell is the
smallest unit of the structure and function of all living systems (Swanson 1964), it
was apparently not until 1983 that the first comprehensive theoretical model of the
cell was proposed (Ji 1985a, b, 2002b). In that year, a theoretical model of the living
informational
aspects of life were integrated on an equal footing, based on the
