| Topic |
Sub-topic |
| I |
PROCESSES |
| 1 |
Membrane potential. Excitable membranes. Action potential. The nervous impulse. Ion channels in nerve cell membranes. Synaptic transmission. |
| 2 |
Membrane transport. Fluid mosaic model. Significance of molecular movements in the membrane. Brownian diffusion and movement. Fick's law. General mechanisms of membrane transport. Thermodynamic model of the sodium pump. |
| 3 |
Transmission of energy at the membrane level. Translocation of protons and proton-motor force in electron transport chains. Chemiosmotic model. Coupling between electron transport chains and ATP synthesis. Examples of processes associated with the proton-motor force. |
| 4 |
Capture of light energy. Excitation of molecules by light. Pigments and photosystems. Electron transport in photosynthetic systems. Photophosphorylation. |
| 5 |
The eye as an optical instrument. General structure, poles and cones. Molecular bases of vision. Absorption and emission of light. Other applications of the rhodopsin system. |
| 6 |
Muscle contraction The muscle and its diversity. Organization of skeletal muscle. Contractile muscle proteins. Mechanism and regulation of muscle contraction. Muscle contraction energy. |
| 7 |
Cytoskeleton, cilia and flagella. Actin-dependent motor systems. Microtubule systems. Movement of cilia and flagella. Intracellular transport. Bacterial motility. |
| II |
SYSTEM DYNAMICS |
| 1 |
Introduction to system dynamics.
|
| 2 |
Principles of thermodynamics in biological systems. Energy, heat, work. First law. Entropy and living matter. Free energy and concentration. Chemical potential. High-energy phosphate compounds. |
| 3 |
Generalization of the second principle in open systems. Dissipation function. Phenomenological equations. Minimal entropy production principle. Stability of stationary states. Unbalanced processes. |
| 4 |
Deterministic analysis of systems. Kinetic processes as systems of differential equations. Stationary solutions. Lotka-Volterra model. Dynamics of systems. Structural stability and bifurcations. |
| 5 |
Biological oscillations. Self-organization in living things. Periodic behaviors in biological systems. Rhythms. Glycolysis oscillations. Rhythms of enzyme activity. Chaos |
| 6 |
Stochastic analysis of systems. Dynamics of a system through stochastic treatment. Markov chains. Simulation of stochastic processes. Monte Carlo Method. |
| 7 |
Evolution, an irreversible process. Prebiotic evolution. Modeling selection and evolution. Hypercycles. tRNA as fossils of prebiotic evolution. RNY hypothesis. |
| 8 |
Fluxes and forces in molecular evolution. Speed of evolution. Stochastic matrices of protein and gene evolution. Genomic distances. Models of molecular evolution. |
| III |
BIOENERGETICS |
| 1 |
Principles of Bioenergetics |
| 2 |
Problems of Bioenergetics
|
Subjects
