Clas Blomberg - Physics of life-Elsevier Science (2007)

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Contents
12 The biological molecules 96
12A General properties of proteins and amino acids 96
12B Sugars 104
12C Nucleic acids 105
12D The genetic code 108
12E Energy-storing substances 111
12F Lipids: membranes 112
13 What is life? 113
Part IV Going further with thermodynamics
14 Thermodynamics formalism and examples: Combinatorial expressions and
Stirling’s formula 117
14A General formalism: energy concepts 118
14B Mixing entropy 123
14C Water: solubility 125
14D Formalism of mixing and solutions* 126
14E Chemical thermodynamics* 129
14F Non-equilibrium thermodynamics* 132
15 Examples of entropy and order/disorder 138
15A Shuffling cards 139
15B The monkey library and DNA 140
15C Order and disorder 142
15D The relation to the second law 144
16 Statistical thermodynamics models 146
16A Magnetic analogies and molecule conformations 146
16B Ising-type models of 1D systems* 156
16C Renormalisation methods* 163
16D Spin glass 169
Part V Stochastic dynamics
17 Probability concepts 173
17A Examples 174
17B Normal distribution: approximation of binomial distribution 177
18 Stochastic processes 178
18A Introduction: general account 178
18B Terminology and formal basis 180
18C Ergodicity in biology 181
19 Random walk* 182
19A Formalism 183
19B Absorbing and reflecting boundaries 186
19C First passage time 188
19D Non-intersecting random walk 190
20 Step processes: master equations* 191
20A Poisson process 193
20B Processes with a small number of states and constant transition probabilities 194
20C Formalism: matrix method 195
20D A process with constant average and extinction possibility 201