Work cycles living cells

Many unicellular eukaryotes are free-living cells, but may form huge local communities, which are especially beneficial to the homeostasis of the ocean/atmos-phere carbon cycle, e.g. coccoliths. Many others are not free-living, but are extremely valuable in symbiotic relationship with multi-cellular plants and animals. Unfortunately, some unicellular eukaryotes are the causes of disease, for example Trypanosoma, which are animals and cause sleeping sickness in humans (see Section 8.9 for parallel diseases of plants). These facts are reminders that while we consider that the whole ecosystem works to one general purpose (Section 4.4), this does not exclude the obvious feature that within its overall associations we can see diseases inflicted on one species by another or competition between similar species. Many bacteria are also causes of serious eukaryote diseases. Even so at the end of... 

PCR Lab-on-Chip devices are miniaturized fluidic systems for fast DNA amplification. The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a molecular biological technique for addressing and exponentially amplifying a DNA fragment. The PCR process is based on tenperature cycles with an enzymatic amplification step. It works without the use of a living cell. For PCR, a liquid mixture of an analyte... 

The formation of cross-links on DNA has the potential to affect directly two essential cellular processes, replication and transcription. Early work demonstrated that cisplatin could inhibit replication under conditions that did not block transcription or translation [2], Adducts formed by trans-DDP can also inhibit DNA polymerases [4], however, and it has become evident that cisplatin lesions are not absolute blocks for replication (see the review by Villiani et al, this book). Furthermore, cisplatin commonly causes an arrest in the G2 phase of the cell cycle [149], suggesting that inhibition of gene expression, and not replication, determines whether the cell will live and divide, or undergo apoptosis. 

Kauffmann defined a living system as a physical cell able to self reproduce and at least able to complete a single thermodynamic cycle that executes work. A minimal model of primitive self maintaining cells named chemoton was defined by Ganti It is composed of ... 

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