Beyond the fuzzy lock-and-key: spontaneous symmetry shifts and glycan/lectin logic gates

Changes in the molecular topology of glycan/lectin interaction may explain observed reaction punctuation driven by experimental gradients in reactant concentration. Adoption of a ‘biological renormalization’ perspective from statistical physics for the analysis of such phase transitions suggests, in marked contrast to conventional physical systems, a broad spectrum of possible universality class behaviors. This spectrum may, in typical perverse biological manner, be of central scientific interest. Generalization, via formalism abducted from coevolutionary theory, suggests that glycan/lectin molecular switches instantiate logic gates that may be as sophisticated as those characterizing basic neural process, if on a different scale.