Biomolecular Basis of Cellular Consciousness via Subcellular Nanobrains

" In the evolutionary origins of the eukaryotic cell (Box 1), both the large, actin-based host cell and the smaller guest cell, which relied on the tubulin-based cytoskeleton, were proposed to be ancient archaea [15,16,17]. This may allow the merging of their fields to generate the new stronger and senomic field of an emergent eukaryotic cell. In addition to the excitable plasma membrane and membranes of recycling vesicles, other cellular structures that are capable of contributing to the cellular fields are the large, bundled, vibrating elements of the cytoskeleton (Box 2), such as F-actin [40,41,42,43] and microtubules [44,45,46,47]. Both excitable plasma membrane and cytoskeletal elements have been proposed to generate proto-consciousness of individual eukaryotic cells [22,48]." {Credits 1}

" Vibrations of excitable polymers contribute to the intracellular electromagnetic fields and can be expected to interact with the field emanating from the excitable plasma membrane. As microtubules act as memristors, as combinations of memory and electromagnetic resistance [49], they are well suited to faithfully decode the cellular senomic fields and to act accordingly. Furthermore, microtubules are structurally linked to both the actin filaments as well as the plasma membrane; they are perfectly suited to generate subcellular bioelectric circuits [49,50]." {Credits 1}

" Two ancient cells merging into one resulted in the generation of supracellular chimeric consciousness having four different excitable sources: two plasma membranes, F-actin, and microtubules. The plasma membrane of the host cells, associated with the actin cytoskeleton, produced the senomic fields of contemporary chimeric eukaryotic cells. The guest cell transformed into the eukaryotic nucleus with the centrosome associated with centriole and organizing perinuclear microtubules [51]. The plasma membrane and the nuclear envelope/centrosome/microtubules complex can be viewed as two different cellular nanobrains, the origin, of which can be traced back to the two ancient cells, which merged together, forming the first eukaryotic cell [15,16,17]. Vibrations of F-actin and microtubules contribute significantly to the cellular electromagnetic field [45,46]." {Credits 1}

" Cells continuously rearrange their molecules according to their actual sensory experiences mediated via senomic fields [37,38,39]. Senomic fields animate cellular biomolecules not only through biotensengrity [72,73,74] but also by electrical, magnetic, acoustic, and photonic and Lorentz forces, which permeate the cellular interior [75,76,77,78,79], continuously effecting changing conformations of all cellular biomolecules. Senomic nano-mind generated via cellular nanobrains allows a scale-free cognition to generate the self [37,48,80,81]." {Credits 1}

" Importantly, ultrafast and abundant electron transfers occur within proteins [163]. Thus, not only the sequence of amino acids but especially these electrostatic forces control post-translational protein folding [164,165,166]. The central dogma of molecular biology is missing this biological reality as the three-dimensional conformations of proteins are not dictated solely by the information encoded in DNA sequences [141,142], but rather through the bioelectric properties of proteins and their subcellular physicochemical senomic environment, including special properties of water interacting with diverse cellular surfaces. Moreover, any biological structure acts as information relevant for biocommunication, which implies that the basic life processes have fundamentally cognitive features [22,23,24,124,125,126,140,167,168,169,170,171,172,173,174,175,176]. In a poetic language, proteins are dancing to senomic tunes within the cellular senomic environment." {Credits 1}

" Cells not only generate their own electromagnetic fields but are highly sensitive to extracellular electromagnetic fields [76,77,181,182,183,184,185,186]. It has been recently reported [186] that action potentials traveling along vascular bundles of carnivorous Venus flytrap plants induce biomagnetic fields. In fact, cellular bioelectricity has a significant role in the control of development, morphogenesis, and regeneration at all levels of biological complexity [80,81,133,136,187]. Already bacteria use bioelectricity both to establish memories and for biocommunication [188,189] that energizes their own prokaryotic-specific nanobrains [169,188,189,190,191,192,193,194]. During cellular evolution, additional functions resulted in the more complex and sophisticated cellular nanobrains of eukaryotic cells (Box 1). Since organelles of eukaryotic cells, such as mitochondria and plastids, are of bacterial origin, one can expect further discoveries in our understanding of cellular nanobrains (Box 2). These advances can proceed with the perspective that the eukaryotic cell is a cognitive and intentional supracellular consortium [10,11,14,15,16,17,21,22,23,48]; integrated through ancient proto-signaling networks based on electrostatic forces and reactive electrophilic redox species [195,196,197,198,199,200], dynamic cytoskeleton, and subcellular communication across organellar synapses [201]." {Credits 1}

{Credits 1} 🎪 Baluška, F.; Miller, W.B., Jr.; Reber, A.S. Biomolecular Basis of Cellular Consciousness via Subcellular Nanobrains. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2021, 22, 2545. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms22052545 © 2021 The Authors. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License..