THE ROLE OF PHYSICAL AND GEOMETRICAL FACTORS IN THE GROWTH OF LIVING ORGANISMS

Abstract

The relationship between the organism's growth and its geometrical form was suggested by many ancient and modern thinkers. Many other factors influence growth and replication. All these numerous factors, such as biochemical, physical, work in cooperation. In this paper, we consider the impact of geometrical and physical characteristics of organisms, such as surface, volume and geometrical form, on organisms' growth and replication. The mathematical basis of our study is the growth equation, which describes growth from the physical perspective. First, we model the growth of cells by different shapes, and compare theoretical results to experimental data. We discover that the growth dependencies produced by the growth equation fit experimental data very accurately if we take into account two considerations. First, the cell, or a multicellular growing object, can switch into a replication phase before its physical growth potential is exhausted. Second, the inflow of substance through a unit of the membrane's surface increases during growth, because the cell's growing volume allows it to process more nutrients. Then, we consider overgrowth from the physical perspective, introduce the notion of a growth ratio as an important geometrical characteristic of the growth and overgrowth processes, and generalize our findings.