Napoleon Is in Equilibrium.
Napoleon Is in Equilibrium.
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DOI：
10.1146/annurev-conmatphys-031214-014558
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发表时间：
2015-03
影响因子：
22.6
通讯作者：
Phillips R
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Phillips R
有人说，细胞是21世纪的试管。如果是这样的话，定量和预测性地描述这种试管中发生的事情所需的理论工具远远落后于分子生物学革命开始以来几十年来生物学实验的惊人进展。也许令人惊讶的是，统计力学是一种理论工具，它在解决从细胞如何与环境以及细胞之间如何交流到细胞膜内蛋白质和脂质组织的性质等问题上取得了巨大成功。在使用统计力学描述细胞过程时，人们的下意识反应是，生物体离平衡状态太远了，人们甚至没有必要去想它，但这种反应可能太仓促了，因为在许多情况下，由于时间尺度的分离，这种方法可能是有用的第一步。在这篇文章中，我们将探讨统计机械思维在生物学环境中的力量，特别强调细胞信号传导和调节。我们展示了如何使用这些模型来进行预测，并描述了一些最近的实验，旨在测试它们。我们还考虑了这些模型的限制的基础上的相对时间尺度的过程的利益。
It has been said that the cell is the test tube of the twenty-first century. If so, the theoretical tools needed to quantitatively and predictively describe what goes on in such test tubes lag sorely behind the stunning experimental advances in biology seen in the decades since the molecular biology revolution began. Perhaps surprisingly, one of the theoretical tools that has been used with great success on problems ranging from how cells communicate with their environment and each other to the nature of the organization of proteins and lipids within the cell membrane is statistical mechanics. A knee-jerk reaction to the use of statistical mechanics in the description of cellular processes is that living organisms are so far from equilibrium that one has no business even thinking about it. But such reactions are probably too hasty given that there are many regimes in which, because of a separation of timescales, for example, such an approach can be a useful first step. In this article, we explore the power of statistical mechanical thinking in the biological setting, with special emphasis on cell signaling and regulation. We show how such models are used to make predictions and describe some recent experiments designed to test them. We also consider the limits of such models based on the relative timescales of the processes of interest.