Metabolic Machines

Computing with Metabolic Machines

If Turing were a first-year graduate student interested in computers, he would probably migrate into the field of computational biology. During his studies, he presented a work about a mathematical and computational model of the morphogenesis process, in which chemical substances react together. Moreover, a protein can be thought of as a computational element, i.e. a processing unit, able to tr...

Muscles as molecular and metabolic machines.

SKELETAL MUSCLE IS THE LARGEST ORGAN in humans, comprising 50% of the total body mass. While this tissue functions to sustain normal daily physical activity, skeletal muscle is also involved in regulating metabolic homeostasis. For example, early studies in skeletal muscle revealed that glucose transport was stimulated not just by insulin but also by muscle contraction/exercise in an insulin-in...

Machines Reasoning About Machines: 2015

The role of the genome in the evolution of the complexity of metabolic machines

In this positional paper, we consider the metabolic network of a bacterium as a living computer, and we are able to program it in order to obtain desired outputs. Furthermore, we discuss how the mutation-recombination-fixation events in the genome could lead to an increased computational capability, as well as to an increased complexity of the metabolic machine associated with the bacterium.

Analysis and prediction of nutritional requirements using structural properties of metabolic networks and support vector machines.

Properties of graph representation of genome scale metabolic networks have been extensively studied. However, the relationship between these structural properties and functional properties of the networks are still very unclear. In this paper, we focus on nutritional requirements of organisms as a functional property and study the relationship with structural properties of a graph representatio...