Towards a statistical characterisation of the living state of matter

✍ Scribed by Marco Buiatti; Marcello Buiatti

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2004
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 90 KB
• Volume: 20
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0960-0779
• DOI: 10.1016/s0960-0779(03)00427-2

✦ Synopsis

It was recently proposed that, despite their diversity, living systems can be characterised by a set of specific, coexisting features. In this paper, after recalling what these features are, we try to afford a statistical characterisation of the emerging state, previously introduced as the living state of matter. We show that recent work on DNA sequences suggests a well-defined statistical characterisation of this particular state. We then investigate whether these properties can be extended to living systems with higher complexity. Recent research on neuronal activity in the brain suggests the fascinating, yet simplistic idea that such systems behave statistically as a multi-dimensional version of the onedimensional system used to model DNA statistics.