Abstract
Key physical concepts, relevant for the cross-fertilization between condensed matter physics and the physics of life seen as a collective phenomenon in a system out-of-equilibrium, are discussed. The onset of life can be driven by: (a) the critical fluctuations at the protonic percolation threshold in membrane transport; (b) the stochastic resonance in biological systems, a mechanism that can exploit external and self-generated noise in order to gain efficiency in signal processing; and (c) the shape resonance (or Fano resonance or Feshbach resonance) in the association and dissociation processes of bio-molecules (a quantum mechanism that could play a key role to establish a macroscopic quantum coherence in the cell).
Highlights
Today we know most molecular components of a minimal cell and their interactions using novel microscopy and spectroscopy methods taking advantage of synchrotron radiation, lasers, magnetic resonance using photons from x-ray to radiofrequency, neutrons and quantum effects such as in atomic force microscopy and the Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET)
The genomic data allows us to look for new ideas of evolution, which can be considered as a collective phenomenon far from equilibrium [1]
In [29] it has been proposed that stochastic resonance can be a common phenomenon in sensory biology in which the sensors operates in presence of external or endogenous noise
Summary
Today we know most molecular components of a minimal cell and their interactions using novel microscopy and spectroscopy methods taking advantage of synchrotron radiation, lasers, magnetic resonance using photons from x-ray to radiofrequency, neutrons and quantum effects such as in atomic force microscopy and the Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET). The collection of all these data, does not give us substantial clues on the overall cell functioning; a number of scientists have started to think that it is becoming feasible to search for new physical laws of the living matter for the foundations of a new physics of life. Founding the physics of the living cell means to find the general laws governing the cooperative network of networks of thousands of different selected biomolecules spanning a large time scale from picoseconds to years and space scales from nanometers to meters. The aim of this review paper is to focus on three known concepts of statistical physics and quantum mechanics that could play a key role in the foundations of a physics of living matter
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