Self-replication is any behavior of a dynamical system that yields construction of an identical or similar copy of itself. Biological cells, given suitable environments, reproduce by cell division. During cell division, DNA is replicated and can be transmitted to offspring during reproduction. Biological viruses can replicate, but only by commandeering the reproductive machinery of cells through a process of infection. Harmful prion proteins can replicate by converting normal proteins into rogue forms. Computer viruses reproduce using the hardware and software already present on computers. Self-replication in robotics has been an area of research and a subject of interest in science fiction. Any self-replicating mechanism which does not make a perfect copy (mutation) will experience genetic variation and will create variants of itself. These variants will be subject to natural selection, since some will be better at surviving in their current environment than others and will out-breed them.
Von Neumann universal constructor
Early research by John von Neumann established that replicators have several parts:
A coded representation of the replicator
A mechanism to copy the coded representation
A mechanism for effecting construction within the host environment of the replicator
Exceptions to this pattern may be possible, although none have yet been achieved. For example, scientists have come close to constructing RNA that can be copied in an "environment" that is a solution of RNA monomers and transcriptase. In this case, the body is the genome, and the specialized copy mechanisms are external. The requirement for an outside copy mechanism has not yet been overcome, and such systems are more accurately characterized as "assisted replication" than "self-replication". Nonetheless, in March 2021, researchers reported evidence suggesting that a preliminary form of transfer RNA could have been a replicator molecule itself in the very early development of life, or abiogenesis.
However, the simplest possible case is that only a genome exists.
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
A self-replicating machine is a type of autonomous robot that is capable of reproducing itself autonomously using raw materials found in the environment, thus exhibiting self-replication in a way analogous to that found in nature. The concept of self-replicating machines has been advanced and examined by Homer Jacobson, Edward F. Moore, Freeman Dyson, John von Neumann, Konrad Zuse and in more recent times by K.
Self-replication is any behavior of a dynamical system that yields construction of an identical or similar copy of itself. Biological cells, given suitable environments, reproduce by cell division. During cell division, DNA is replicated and can be transmitted to offspring during reproduction. Biological viruses can replicate, but only by commandeering the reproductive machinery of cells through a process of infection. Harmful prion proteins can replicate by converting normal proteins into rogue forms.
A virus is a submicroscopic infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of an organism. Viruses infect all life forms, from animals and plants to microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea. Since Dmitri Ivanovsky's 1892 article describing a non-bacterial pathogen infecting tobacco plants and the discovery of the tobacco mosaic virus by Martinus Beijerinck in 1898, more than 11,000 of the millions of virus species have been described in detail.
We will study the emergence of life-like phenomena, such as locomotion, resilience,, reproduction, and evolution in mathematical models, in particular in discrete and continuous cellular automata, dev
Le but du cours est de fournir un aperçu général de la biologie des cellules et des organismes. Nous en discuterons dans le contexte de la vie des cellules et des organismes, en mettant l'accent sur l
"There is more virus in us than us in us". John Coffin's famous sentence illustrates that particular nucleic acid sequences related to exogenous viruses, called retrotransposons, constitute almost hal
Soft actuators made from elastomeric active materials can find widespread potential implementation in a variety of applications ranging from assistive wearable technologies targeted at biomedical reha
Thanks to recent advancements in synthetic biology, the dream of creating a synthetic cell has become feasible. However, due to its inherent complexity, one of the fundamental functions of all living