IMR Press / FBE / Volume 6 / Issue 1 / DOI: 10.2741/E703

Frontiers in Bioscience-Elite (FBE) is published by IMR Press from Volume 13 Issue 2 (2021). Previous articles were published by another publisher on a subscription basis, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement with Frontiers in Bioscience.

Review
Emergence of biological organization through thermodynamic inversion
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1 Institute for Complex Analysis, 4 Sholom Aleyhem St., Birobidzhan 679016, Russia

*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

 

Front. Biosci. (Elite Ed) 2014, 6(1), 208–224; https://doi.org/10.2741/E703
Published: 1 January 2014
Abstract

Biological organization arises under thermodynamic inversion in prebiotic systems that provide the prevalence of free energy and information contribution over the entropy contribution. The inversion might occur under specific far-from-equilibrium conditions in prebiotic systems oscillating around the bifurcation point. At the inversion moment, (physical) information characteristic of non-biological systems acquires the new features: functionality, purposefulness, and control over the life processes, which transform it into biological information. Random sequences of amino acids and nucleotides, spontaneously synthesized in the prebiotic microsystem, in the primary living unit (probiont) re-assemble into functional sequences, involved into bioinformation circulation through nucleoprotein interaction, resulted in the genetic code emergence. According to the proposed concept, oscillating three-dimensional prebiotic microsystems transformed into probionts in the changeable hydrothermal medium of the early Earth. The inversion concept states that spontaneous (accidental, random) transformations in prebiotic systems cannot produce life; it is only non-spontaneous (perspective, purposeful) transformations, which are the result of thermodynamic inversion, that lead to the negentropy conversion of prebiotic systems into initial living units.

Keywords
Origin of Life
Biological information
Entropy and Free Energy
Nonequilibrium Conditions
Bifurcation
Properties of Biological Systems
Biosemiosis
Functional Sequences
Review
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