What is life? How did life arise from non-life? What did life look like at its origin?

​Big Biology is a podcast that tells the stories of scientists tackling some of the biggest unanswered questions in biology. Tune into Episode 9 of the podcast to hear hosts Art and Marty talk with Sara walker about how life might have arisen on Earth and why biologists and physicists should work together to find a theory of life.

Enrico Borriello and Sara Walker, in collaboration with theoretical biologist Manfred Laubichler, just published a preprint on arXiv titled "A unified, mechanistic framework for developmental and evolutionary change".

The paper tackles difficulties with the idea that cell phenotypes correspond to stable points (attractors) in genetic regular networks (GRNs). Rather than a one-to-one map between the attractor and the phenotype, the authors propose that phenotypes are relevant macrostates of the GRNs. This resolves the issue of phenotypes being fixed size and enables a unified theory of genotypic change over both developmental and evolutionary timescales.

The full paper can be found here.