Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2403.00003

Radical Pair Mechanism and the Role of Chirality-Induced Spin Selectivity during Planaria Regeneration: Effect of Weak Magnetic Field on ROS levels

Abstract

Planarian is an intriguing model system wherein the effect of electric and magnetic fields can be studied on various biochemical pathways during cell morphogenesis. Recent experimental observations have demonstrated the non-trivial modulation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) levels by a weak magnetic field during planaria regeneration. However, the underlying biophysical mechanism behind this remains elusive. In this paper, we study the radical pair mechanism to explain the effect of weak magnetic fields on ROS modulation during planaria regeneration to explain the experimental results. We also investigate the effect of chirality-induced spin selectivity (CISS) on ROS levels by including it in the framework of the radical pair mechanism. We conclude that the inclusion of CISS explains the experimental results better and allows the radical pair model to have more parametric space to satisfy the experimental constraints. This study explains the crucial process of ROS modulation by the weak magnetic field with and without CISS, thereby paving the way to unraveling the vast domain of ROS modulation for desired outcomes.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Yash Tiwari, Parul Raghuvanshi, Vishvendra Singh Poonia. 2024-01-09. Radical Pair Mechanism and the Role of Chirality-Induced Spin Selectivity during Planaria Regeneration: Effect of Weak Magnetic Field on ROS levels. https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.00003

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Signature of mechanically induced cell extrusions in cell size distribution

How a growing tissue organizes its own homeostatic state is a central question in the physics of living matter. We show that when a growing epithelial sheet counteracts increasing cell density by mechanically squeezing cells out of its plane, a homeostatic in-plane pressure emerges as a generalization of a yield stress. We find that in the quasistatic growth limit the homeostatic state is marginally stable, with a pseudogap in the distribution of local distances to the extrusion threshold pressure. Because such mechanically induced extrusions arise from an instability of individual cells, the pseudogap is imprinted in the distribution of cell areas. This provides an image-based way to test for presence of mechanically induced extrusions and we identify this signature in the developing wing epithelium of \textit{D.~melanogaster}. We expect the same principles to apply to confined three-dimensional tissues.

physics.bio-ph

Towards Accurate Prediction of Mutation-Induced Changes in Protein Structure

Proteins can possess numerous mutations relative to their wild-type amino acid sequences with minimal impact to their structure and function. However, in other cases, even a single amino acid mutation relative to the wild-type sequence can lead to a large change in structure or even a disease phenotype. While the accuracy of wild-type protein structure prediction has improved significantly in recent years, it remains difficult to accurately predict the structure of mutant proteins. Here, we characterize the local mutation-induced structural changes in proteins for a dataset of wildtype and the corresponding single-amino acid mutant x-ray crystal structures from the Protein Data Bank (PDB). We find that mutation-induced structural changes in these proteins are localized at the site of the mutation, decaying rapidly with increasing spatial distance from the mutation site. In addition, we evaluate how well AlphaFold3 can recapitulate the observed mutation-induced structural deformations in the x-ray crystal structures. We find that the accuracy of the AlphaFold3 predictions decreases strongly with increasing mutation-induced deformation. In contrast to the results for AlphaFold3, the Pearson correlation between a single physical feature, i.e. the change in solvent accessibility, and the mutation-induced deformation does not depend on the magnitude of the deformation. Our results and analyses provide a framework for further studies aimed at predicting the structural changes in proteins caused by single amino acid mutations.

physics.bio-ph

Biology and Physics

This article frames the relation between biology and physics by characterizing the former as a subdiscipline rather than a special case of the latter. To do this, we posit biological physics as the science of living matter in contrast to classic biophysics, the study of organismal properties by physical techniques. At the scale of the individual cell, living matter is nonunitary, i.e., not composed of aggregated subunits, and has features (e.g., intracellular organizational arrangements and biomolecular condensates) that are unlike any materials of the nonliving world. In transiently or constitutively multicellular forms (social microorganisms, animals, plants), living matter sustains physical processes that are generic (shared with nonliving matter, e.g., subunit communication by molecular diffusion in cellular slime molds), biogeneric (analogous to nonliving matter but realized through cellular activities, e.g., subunit demixing in animal embryos) or nongeneric (pertaining to sui generis materials, e.g., budding of active solids in plants). This "forms of matter" perspective is philosophically situated in the dialectical materialism of Engels and Hessen and the multilevel physicalism of Neurath and the logical empiricists. We counterpose this view to informationism and to genetic and other hierarchically reductionist physical theories of biological systems and highlight open questions regarding incompletely characterized and enigmatic forms of living matter.

physics.bio-ph