The Use of the Statistical Entropy in Some New Approaches for the Description of Biosystems

Abstract

Some problems of describing biological systems with the use of entropy as a measure of the complexity of these systems are considered. Entropy is studied both for the organism as a whole and for its parts down to the molecular level. Correlation of actions of various parts of the whole organism, intercellular interactions and control, as well as cooperativity on the microlevel lead to a more complex structure and lower statistical entropy. For a multicellular organism, entropy is much lower than entropy for the same mass of a colony of unicellular organisms. Cooperativity always reduces the entropy of the system; a simple example of ligand binding to a macromolecule carrying two reaction centers shows how entropy is consistent with the ambiguity of the result in the Bernoulli test scheme. Particular attention is paid to the qualitative and quantitative relationship between the entropy of the system and the cooperativity of ligand binding to macromolecules. A kinetic model of metabolism. corresponding to Schrödinger’s concept of the maintenance biosystems by “negentropy feeding”, is proposed. This model allows calculating the nonequilibrium local entropy and comparing it with the local equilibrium entropy inherent in non-living matter.

The Degradation and Aging of Biological Systems as a Process of Information Loss and Entropy Increase

“…We treat aging as a physical phenomenon within the framework of the approach to the problem of describing the degradation of systems. This study can be seen as a continuation of our work that uses the concept of entropy to describe processes in biosystems [5]. Note that here, we follow the Schrödinger principle, which implies that a biological system in a time-stable state requires a constant influx of negative entropy (negentropy); however, Entropy 2023, 25, 1067 2 of 13 in addition, in this paper, we consider changes in entropy itself in the body due to slow degradation processes.…”

“…Accordingly, it can be estimated by the rate of glucose metabolism (see also [27][28][29]). Note that in [5], the kinetic model of inhomogeneous spatial relaxation describes this process. The second process is a slow degradation with a characteristic time T = Nτ, where N is a very large number, τ is the time of a characteristic metabolic reaction, and T is the average lifetime of the animal.…”

“…The green line shows such a dependence for the skin cells of a young person, and the blue line for the skin cells of an elderly person. In work [5], we estimated the local statistical entropy and found that during aging, relaxation processes dominate over advection (transport) processes.…”

“…In the simplest case of a physical system, this function defines a dependence of particle density f (x, ξ) in the system on x coordinate and velocity ξ. It is shown in [5] that for the distribution function on the relaxation timescale, neglecting slow changes in aging, the stationary kinetic equation can be written as follows:…”

A New Model of Hemoglobin Oxygenation

“…Recent work has shown that allosteric interactions expand the ability of biological systems to store information [ 3 ]. It has also been demonstrated that cooperative interactions lead to an entropy reduction in the system [ 4 ]. In particular, the cooperation between the subunits of ion channels during nerve impulse generation potentiates the ability of neurons and nerve networks to process information [ 5 ].…”