Physics - Molecular Theory of the Living Cell - page 61

Fig. 2.11 The Bhopalator - a molecular model of the living cell (Reproduced from Ji 1985a, b).
The cell can be treated as the physical system wherein micro-meso correlations occur under a wide
variety of environmental conditions supported by free energy utilizing enzymes acting as coinci-
dence detectors (see Sect. 7.2.2 ) . The Bhopalator consists of a total of 20 major steps: 1 ¼ DNA
replication; 2 ¼ transcription; 3 ¼ translation; 4 ¼ protein folding; 5 ¼ substrate binding; 6 ¼
activation of the enzyme-substrate complex; 7 ¼ equilibration between the substrate and the
product at the metastable transition state; 8 ¼ product release contributing to the formation of
the intracellular dissipative structure (IDS); 9 ¼ recycling of the enzyme; 10 ¼ IDS-induced
changes in DNA structure; 11-18 ¼ feedback interactions mediated by IDS; 19 ¼ input of
substrate into the cell; and 20

the output of the cell effected by IDSs, which makes cell function
and IDSs synonymous (see Sect. 10.1 for more details)

¼

machines driven by conformational strains (i.e., conformons) generated from
chemical reactions and localized in sequence-specific sites. The arrows, both
solid and dotted, represent molecular processes mostly catalyzed by enzymes
(which are viewed as elementary coincidence detectors (see Sect. 7.2.2 ) ) that are
organized in space and time to produce coherent behaviors of cells at the meso-