Non-equilibrium dynamics as an indispensable characteristic of a healthy biological system |
| |
Authors: | Chung-Kang Peng Sergey V Buldyrev Jeffrey M Hausdorff Shlomo Havlin Joseph E Mietus Michael Simons H Eugene Stanley Ary L Goldberger |
| |
Institution: | 1. Harvard Medical School, GZ-435 Beth Israel Hospital, 330 Brookline Ave., 02215, Boston, MA 2. Center for Polymer Studies, Boston University, Boston, MA 3. Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel 4. MIT, Cambridge, MA
|
| |
Abstract: | Healthy systems in physiology and medicine are remarkable for their structural variability and dynamical complexity. The concept
of fractal growth and form offers novel approaches to understanding morphogenesis and function from the level of the gene
to the organism. For example, scale-invariance and long-range power-law correlations are features of non-coding DNA sequences
as well as of healthy heartbeat dynamics. For cardiac regulation, perturbation of the control mechanisms by disease or aging
may lead to a breakdown of these long-range correlations that normally extend over thousands of heartbeats. Quantification
of such long-range scaling alterations are providing new approaches to problems ranging from molecular evolution to monitoring
patients at high risk of sudden death.
We briefly review recent work from our laboratory concerning the application of fractals to two apparently unrelated problems:
DNA organization and beat-to-beat heart rate variability. We show how the measurement of long-range power-law correlations
may provide new understanding of nucleotide organization as well as of the complex fluctuations of the heartbeat under normal
and pathologic conditions. |
| |
Keywords: | |
本文献已被 SpringerLink 等数据库收录! |
|