Selfish metabolism

Selfish metabolism

2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 7: 7–13, 2008 E volutionary biology has traditionally made much of the concept of selfishness. Charles Darwin reduced adaptation (and to a less satisfying degree, speciation) to the heritable variation and competition among individuals. As understanding of the genetic control of heredity and morphogenesis has become more sophisticated, Richard Dawkins has...

Selfish Knapsack

We consider a selfish variant of the knapsack problem. In our version, the items are owned by agents, and each agent can misrepresent the set of items she owns—either by avoiding reporting some of them (understating), or by reporting additional ones that do not exist (overstating). Each agent’s objective is to maximize, within the items chosen for inclusion in the knapsack, the total valuation ...

Carbohydrate-Biased Control of Energy Metabolism: The Darker Side of the Selfish Brain

IntroductIon There is evidence that the brain favors consumption of carbohydrates (CHO) rather than fats, this preference resulting in glycolysis-based energy metabolism domination. This metabolic mode, typical for consumers of the “Western diet” (Cordain et al., 2005; Seneff et al., 2011), is characterized by over-generation of reactive oxygen species and advanced glycation products both of wh...

From the phosphoenolpyruvate phosphotransferase system to selfish metabolism: a story retraced in Pseudomonas putida.

Although DNA is the ultimate repository of biological information, deployment of its instructions is constrained by the metabolic and physiological status of the cell. To this end, bacteria have evolved intricate devices that connect exogenous signals (e.g. nutrients, physicochemical conditions) with endogenous conditions (metabolic fluxes, biochemical networks) that coordinately influence expr...

The Selfish Brain Theory