Stable States of Biological Organisms

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive five-dimensional dynamical model of biological organisms that captures their stability and different states, including health, criticality, and death, based on interactions among cells and pathogens.

Contribution

It presents a novel holistic model of organisms as self-consistent systems, analyzing stability and identifying four distinct stable states.

Findings

The model exhibits robust structural stability across a wide parameter range.

Four stable stationary states are identified: alive, boundary, critical, and dead.

The model provides insights into organism health and failure mechanisms.

Abstract

A novel model of biological organisms is advanced, treating an organism as a self-consistent system subject to a pathogen flux. The principal novelty of the model is that it describes not some parts, but a biological organism as a whole. The organism is modeled by a five-dimensional dynamical system. The organism homeostasis is described by the evolution equations for five interacting components: healthy cells, ill cells, innate immune cells, specific immune cells, and pathogens. The stability analysis demonstrates that, in a wide domain of the parameter space, the system exhibits robust structural stability. There always exist four stable stationary solutions characterizing four qualitatively differing states of the organism: alive state, boundary state, critical state, and dead state.