Membranes, macro-molecules and passive/active transport across membranes

[BrainAnnex]

With the recently-released Beta 12 version, Life123 has by now established a substantial amount of the infrastructures for data science, software management and visualization, for diffusion and (single binding site) reactions.

It's now time to shift into a higher gear with the modeling... and start by introducing elements that have been on the table from the very inception of the project:

- membranes
- macro-molecules (with multiple binding sites)
- passive/active transport across membranes

One guiding criterion to model membranes is the great disparity between the puny thickness of biological membranes (around 4-5 nm) vs. the overwhelmingly larger size of cells (diameters around 0.1 to 5 μm for prokaryotes and some 10-100 μm for eukaryotes.)

We're talking about ratios (of membrane thickness to cell diameter) of some 1:20 to 1:25,000!

A handy source of typical biological values can be found on this site.

[BrainAnnex]

The newest release, Beta 13, rolled out a full implementation of the data structure in 1D, designed to be biologically relevant and extendable to 2D and 3D, plus functions for data management, visualization and reactions.

Diffusion across membranes (passive transport) is expected to be implemented in a few cycles of Beta releases. Membranes in 1-D can be done fairly easily, but the philosophy of the Life123 project is to look ahead at higher dimensions... and strive to do implementations that are conducive to being generalized to 2D and 3D.

A new page on membranes got added to the project's website: https://life123.science/membranes