8. If Stemness Is a Relational or a Systemic Property, How Can We Cure Cancers?

2016 ◽  
pp. 156-178
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Oleksandra O. Kohut

The relevance of the study is determined by the ambiguity of the interpretation of the concept of “stress resistance”, as a result of which there are difficulties in providing assistance to persons suffering from extremely difficult situations. The purpose of the study is to provide the author's interpretation of the category “personality stress”, which summarises the various definitions. To achieve this goal, the author relies on a methodology of a systematic approach that provides clarity in the understanding of the studied category, order and the ability to summarise research information that existed in the form of disparate elements of the disclosure of something more holistic. The author's definition of stress resistance as a complex integrative systemic property of personality, where the components of its structure (psychophysiological, emotional, cognitive, volitional) are in a certain ratio and form a holistic structure – a stable internal organisation that determines the quality and development of the system. It has been found that different definitions of the term are used in relation to the conditions of stress and areas of mental personality. It is confirmed that vitality is used to denote the adaptive properties of a person who overcomes extremely difficult living conditions. It is substantiated that stress resistance in extreme conditions indicates physiological endurance and depends on the skills of self-regulation to restore homeostasis in life-threatening situations. It is noted that the term “resilience” is better used in difficult communication, which violates the emotional balance of the individual. It is stated that spiritual stability determines the strength of will of a person seeking freedom. The practical value of the research is that the scientific developments on the subject matter have received a clear structural and systemic basis, which makes provision for opportunities to more objectively and holistically approach the solution of problems related to stress


2005 ◽  
Vol 13 (02) ◽  
pp. 191-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
VLADIMIR S. LERNER

The paper analyzes Information Geometry (IG) generated by the evolutionary Information Macrodynamics (IMD) which are memorized by IG renovated geometrical structures. The IG encloses a cellular structure which carries a genetic code for the IMD restoration. The paper focuses on the natural enfolding of the universal optimal genetic code into the IG, obtained from the preceding dynamics, with a forthcoming creation of initial genetic information by the IG cells. The field of information geometry consists of the cell's sets that enable the discrete production of a quantum of information at the cells' boundaries. A particular spatial–time dynamic trajectory, located on a curved information space, enfolds and encodes a specific triplet's code, accumulated by the IG cellular information structure. The paper explores a potential conversion of imaginary into real information, associated with the transformation of mind into matter, and evaluates the dissimilar directional "difficulty" of crossing the boundary between imaginary, virtual and physical real information. The attractive information forces, as attributes of the curved IG, assemble the elementary quantums of time-space virtual dynamics into the cooperative macrostructures and information networks. The results analytically prove for the first time that a macrostructure's genetic information is enfolded into the IG geometrical structures. This means that the morphology of any biological macrostructure, as well as its external surface and inner structures, encloses the code of the macrostructure's genetic information. The complexity of encoded macrostructure depends not just on the total number of its corresponding code's symbols, but essentially on the complexity of the coding structure presented by a hierarchy of the code's symbols. This information systemic property, applied to the encoding of biogenetic information, demonstrates that the same gene's number (for different bio-species) can encode proteins with a variety of distinctive complexities, characterizing the huge diversity of biosystems from plants to humans.


2021 ◽  
pp. 190-212
Author(s):  
Fernando Casal Bértoa ◽  
Zsolt Enyedi

The ninth chapter considers polarization as a systemic property, manifested by the proportion of votes collected by anti-political-establishment parties. We find that virtually all party systems that collapsed had high levels of polarization. We also detect a clear tendency towards increasing polarization during the last half century, with important regional variations. According to our data, the degree of polarization is negatively related to closure, even though the systems that combined openness with high anti-political-establishment support have typically collapsed in the past in Europe. Low polarization appears to help the development of closure even in fragmented systems.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie B. Fiévet ◽  
Thibault Nidelet ◽  
Christine Dillmann ◽  
Dominique de Vienne

AbstractHeterosis, the superiority of hybrids over their parents for quantitative traits, represents a crucial issue in plant and animal breeding. Heterosis has given rise to countless genetic, genomic and molecular studies, but has rarely been investigated from the point of view of systems biology. We hypothesized that heterosis is an emergent property of living systems resulting from frequent concave relationships between genotypic variables and phenotypes, or between different phenotypic levels. We chose the enzyme-flux relationship as a model of the concave genotype-phenotype (GP) relationship, and showed that heterosis can be easily created in the laboratory. First, we reconstituted in vitro the upper part of glycolysis. We simulated genetic variability of enzyme activity by varying enzyme concentrations in test tubes. Mixing the content of “parental” tubes resulted in “hybrids”, whose fluxes were compared to the parental fluxes. Frequent heterotic fluxes were observed, under conditions that were determined analytically and confirmed by computer simulation. Second, to test this model in a more realistic situation, we modeled the glycolysis/fermentation network in yeast by considering one input flux, glucose, and two output fluxes, glycerol and acetaldehyde. We simulated genetic variability by randomly drawing parental enzyme concentrations under various conditions, and computed the parental and hybrid fluxes using a system of differential equations. Again we found that a majority of hybrids exhibited positive heterosis for metabolic fluxes. Cases of negative heterosis were due to local convexity between certain enzyme concentrations and fluxes. In both approaches, heterosis was maximized when the parents were phenotypically close and when the distributions of parental enzyme concentrations were contrasted and constrained. These conclusions are not restricted to metabolic systems: they only depend on the concavity of the GP relationship, which is commonly observed at various levels of the phenotypic hierarchy, and could account for the pervasiveness of heterosis.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl Eduard Scheidt ◽  
Stefan Pfänder ◽  
Arianna Ballati ◽  
Stefan Schmidt ◽  
Claas Lahmann

In individual psychotherapy verbal communication and movement synchronization are closely interrelated. The microanalysis of timing, rhythm and gestalt of movement has established dynamic movement coordination as a systemic property of the dyadic interaction. Movement synchronization supports and enhances the unfolding of linguistic meaning. In order to substantiate the importance of the concept of synchrony for adult psychotherapy we review evidence from developmental psychology and discuss approaches to measure synchrony with particular reference to the naturalistic setting of dyadic psychotherapy. As the concept of synchrony is still ambiguous, and the respective interactional phenomena are ephemeral and fluid, in the current paper we suggest a set of five criteria for the description of synchronization in general terms and eight additional criteria which specifically enable the description of phenomena of movement synchronization. The five general dimensions are: (1) context, (2) modality, (3) resources, (4) entrainment, and (5) time-lag. The eight categories for the description of movement synchrony are: (1) spatial direction, (2) amplitude, (3) sinuosity, (4) duration, (5) event structure, (6) phase, (7) frequency, and (8) content. To understand the process of participatory sense-making and the emergence of meaning in psychotherapy, synchrony research has to cope with the multimodality of the embodied interaction. This requires an integrated perspective of movement and language. A system for the classification of synchrony phenomena may contribute to the linking of variations and patterns of movement with language and linguistic utterances.


Genetics ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 97 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 639-666 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrik Kacser ◽  
James A Burns

ABSTRACT The best known genes of microbes, mice and men are those that specify enzymes. Wild type, mutant and heterozygote for variants of such genes differ in the catalytic activity at the step in the enzyme network specified by the gene in question. The effect on the respective phenotypes of such changes in catalytic activity, however, is not defined by the enzyme change as estimated by in vitro determination of the activities obtained from the extracts of the three types. In vivo enzymes do not act in isolation, but are kinetically linked to other enzymes via their substrates and products. These interactions modify the effect of enzyme variation on the phenotype, depending on the nature and quantity of the other enzymes present. An output of such a system, say a flux, is therefore a systemic property, and its response to variation at one locus must be measured in the whole system. This response is best described by the sensitivity coefficient, Z, which is defined by the fractional change in flux over the fractional change in enzyme activity.


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