IMR Press / FBE / Volume 14 / Issue 4 / DOI: 10.31083/j.fbe1404029
Open Access Review
Understanding the Feedback Loops between Energy, Matter and Life
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1 Institute for Anatomy, Medical Faculty, TU Dresden, 01307 Dresden, Germany
*Correspondence: richard.funk@tu-dresden.de (Richard H.W. Funk)
Academic Editor: Alexandros G. Georgakilas
Front. Biosci. (Elite Ed) 2022, 14(4), 29; https://doi.org/10.31083/j.fbe1404029
Submitted: 20 March 2022 | Revised: 8 June 2022 | Accepted: 17 June 2022 | Published: 26 October 2022
Copyright: © 2022 The Author(s). Published by IMR Press.
This is an open access article under the CC BY 4.0 license.
Abstract

This review gathers recent findings in biophysics that shed light on the biological principle of self-organization, spanning from molecules to more complicated systems with higher information processing capacity. The focus is on “feedback loops” from information and matter to an exchange component with a more fundamental meaning than “cybernetic regulation” and “maintenance of homeostasis”. This article proposes that electric and electromagnetic forces are the most important mediators over large distances. Field-like mediation is distinguished from cell-to-cell communication by special electric- or ion-guiding mechanisms that create additional pathways to the “classical” mediators such as nerve conduction or blood flow. Resonance phenomena from phonons and photons in the visible range will be discussed in relation to organelles, cytoskeletal elements and molecules. In this context, the aqueous surrounding of molecules and cells is an important aspect. Many of these phenomena are caused by quantum physics, such as the tunneling of electrons in enzymes or in other coherent working systems. This suggests that quantum information processing is also spread over large-scale areas of an organism.

Keywords
biophysics
information processes
active matter
electromagnetic fields
photons
quantum mechanisms
Figures
Fig. 1.
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