This paper speaks about unicellular consciousness derived for the integration of clocks that all use one kind or another electrical fluctuation or rithm, so apart of deepen on the concept of consciousness in unicellular beings it can have a link to the important role of electromagnetic fields (generated by those fluctuations) to sustain mind itself. " Bioelectricity phenomena, based on redox homeostasis associated electron transfers in membranes and within protein complexes inserted in excitable membranes, play important roles, not only in the cellular circadian clocks and in anesthetics-sensitive cellular sentience (awareness of environment), but also in the coupling of single cells into tissues and organs of unitary multicellular organisms." {Credits 1} " These dynamic fluxes allow cells to extract both energy and information from their environment, making them agents capable of acting in their own interests [1,2]. The processes that support cellular proto-cognition and nano-intentionality are based the membrane-generated bio-electro-magnetic cellular fields [3] acting as the cellular proto-consciousness [1,4,5]." {Credits 1} " The simplest and most ancient circadian cellular clocks are found in cyanobacteria and other prokaryotes. More complex and compound circadian cellular clocks are found in eukaryotic cells where symbiotic partners have their own subcellular clocks and generate from them the circadian clocks of eukaryotic cells (Figure 1). There are two basic types of cellular clocks: the electronic redox cycles (RCs) and transcription-translation loops (TTLs). RCs are ancient and highly conserved, present already in prokaryotic cyanobacteria. ... Both the RCs and TTLs are fully integrated into complex cellular circadian clocks of cells of contemporary multicellular organisms. Their cells integrate first into semi-autonomous tissue- and organ-specific clocks, which integrate further into the organismal clocks." {Credits 1} " In plant bodies, each organ generates its own circadian clock based on integrating the cellular clocks. Importantly, plant cellular clocks are more complex than those in animals because of chloroplasts which run their own organellar clocks. Plant cellular clocks are coupled in tissue- and organ-specific manner, with cell-to-cell coupling of cellular clocks being the strongest in the root and shoot apices (Figure 2). Plant organs isolated from the plant body can maintain their organ-specific clocks as long as they can be kept alive [17,18]. Both animals and plants are complex holobionts and have large numbers of prokaryotes living with them, when the numbers of these prokaryotic cells can be even higher as the number of all their own eukaryotic cells [19-21]. Cellular circadian clocks of these prokaryotic and host cells are integrated into social supracellular clocks in a manner similar to the way the gut microbiome affects the brain and its cognitive and social activities. Social integration and synchronization of organismal clocks is also possible among individuals in social insects and mammals [22-24], as well as between root clocks of plants and fungal clocks of symbiotic arbuscular-mycorrhizal fungi (Figure 2) [21,25]." {Credits 1} " For the endosymbiotic organelles, such as plastids and mitochondria, synchronization of their internal processes, including clocks, was central to achieve the full integration with their host cells. How this full integration of individual cellular clocks into the integrated supra-cellular clock of the eukaryotic cells was accomplished remains a mystery." {Credits 1} " There are fundamental similarities between collective supracellular timekeeping of circadian rhythms and the generation of organismal supracellular sentience through communicative entanglement of the individual cells [1,4,5]." {Credits 1} {Credits 1} 🎪 Baluška, F., & Reber, A. S. (2021). CBC‐Clock Theory of Life–Integration of cellular circadian clocks and cellular sentience is essential for cognitive basis of life. BioEssays, 2100121. © 2021 by the authors. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. |
Last modified on 17-Aug-21 |