Abstract
In living systems, it is crucial to study the exchange of entropy that plays a fundamental role in the understanding of irreversible chemical reactions. However, there are not yet works able to describe in a systematic way the rate of entropy production associated to irreversible processes. Hence, here we develop a theoretical model to compute the rate of entropy in the minimum living system. In particular, we apply the model to the most interesting and relevant case of metabolic network, the glucose catabolism in normal and cancer cells. We show, (i) the rate of internal entropy is mainly due to irreversible chemical reactions, and (ii) the rate of external entropy is mostly correlated to the heat flow towards the intercellular environment. The future applications of our model could be of fundamental importance for a more complete understanding of self-renewal and physiopatologic processes and could potentially be a support for cancer detection.
Highlights
The irreversible processes in living systems are fundamental for determining the autopoietic life development and lead to entropy production in living systems[1,2,3]
Recent works have shown that there is a link between the irreversible processes in the metabolic network, such as glucose catabolism, and epigenetic and gene network[9,10,11,12,13], and that the entropy definition introduced by Clausius and Boltzmann[7, 8] is equivalent to Shannon information entropy[14,15,16,17,18,19]
The glucose catabolism is, among the irreversible reactions occurring in cells, the one having the highest frequency of occurrence and the largest entropy production[40]
Summary
The irreversible processes in living systems are fundamental for determining the autopoietic life development and lead to entropy production in living systems[1,2,3]. The relation between the glucose catabolism and the gene and epigenetic network strengthens during the cancer development[22,23,24,25,26,27,28], likewise there has been a wide use of the intensity of aerobic glycolysis in diagnostics with correlations to cancer prognosis[29,30,31] It is well-known the crucial role played by irreversible reactions in living systems, a self-consistent description of the calculation of the entropy exchanges between the cell and the environment is missing. This latter aspect is widely coherent with the experimental trials and clinical data, and could open new perspectives on the hyperthermia cancer therapy[44, 45]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
