Publication: Desarrollo de un modelo semiempírico de sistema protocelular automantenido con cierre metabólico
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2014-01-07
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Universidad Complutense de Madrid
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Abstract
It is difficult to tackle the problem of the origin of life without a notion of what life is and how it behaves. Probably, the concept of self-organization constitutes one of the keys for understanding biological systems and, in particular, their emergence from a prebiotic scenario of
complex but still inert chemical systems. The study of irreversible processes and the development of far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics (mainly following Prigogine’s school (Nicolis and Prigogine, 1977), together with the know-how and dynamic characterization of diverse selforganizing phenomena in living beings, has given some important clues to unravel possible principles involved in this transition to living matter. However, they have proved clearly insufficient. Beyond self-organization, a certain idea of closure appears at the basis of most theories of
the living that have proposed and attempted a universal characterization of biological systems from its most elementary level (Letelier et al., 2011). These theories claim that living entities should indeed be distinguished by a common, fundamental type of organization and offer solutions to model and characterize it, determining in this way what constitutes the essence of every living system and the reason for its being alive. In this context, the notion of organizational closure appears expressed in various different formalisms and with different degrees of precision among the distinct theories, but they are usually rooted in a common concern: the fact that living organisms must not only organize themselves from within; they must also maintain their organization in the face of changes in their environment and the continuous degradation of their components, highlighting the need of active molecular mechanisms (self-construction) to achieve self-maintenance. This problem is specially addressed in the theory of autopoiesis (Varela et al.,1974) and the theory of (M,R) systems or metabolism-repair systems (Rosen, 1971). According to Rosen, organisms are closed to efficient causation, which means that all the catalysts (efficient
causes) required for an organism to stay alive must be products of the organism activity itself...
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Tesis inédita de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Ciencias Químicas, Departamento de Bioquímica y Biología Molecular I, leída el 19-07-2013