The Biophysical Basis of Cellular Sentience

Cellular sentience is essential for cellular evolution, coterminous with the origin of life. Placing evolution into a framework of cellular sentience grants a contextual understanding of the full range of challenges to which cells are continually exposed and better explains how relevant adaptive responses are achieved at all levels of cellular complexity. Within that sentient framework, the major adaptive role is played by the excitable plasma membrane providing a smart border governing the inside–outside dichotomy. The intelligent plasma membrane acts as a vesicle-generating system, contributing extracellular vesicles that participate in productive manipulation of the extracellular space as well as critically serving in cell–cell communication. Within the cell interior, the plasma membrane generates intracellular endosomal vesicles which internalize small parts of the extracellular space, allowing cells to probe their extracellular environment, helping to satisfy their nutritive needs. The plasma membrane provides the bioelectric boundary of the cellular self, populated by numerous receptors, sensors, transporters, and channels. These combine through ionic flows and signalling cascades, ultimately assembling bioelectromagnetic fields as cellular senomes. These senomic fields permeate the cellular internal space and also radiate externally. Senomic fields are hierarchically organized, starting with the smallest vesicular senomes extending up to the supracellular N-space Episenomes of multicellular organisms. The biophysical basis of cellular sentience was initiated by ancient rotary ATP-ases that were functional participants within the cell’s limiting membranes, providing the energetic basis of the cellular senome and electrome.