Polarity

This book provides, for the first time, a conceptual frame to the problem of natural Polarity spanned through all its evolutionary levels of integration. The hor has scanned over 3000 publications to emphasize the progressive take-over of the primordial electromagnetic bipolarity by intrinsic, genetic and/or extrinsic, environmental factors enforcing biopolar expressions. The evolutionary ladder to such biopolarities is climbed in eight chapters which sequently pervade atomic and molecular dipolar structures, through macromolecules, to intracellular traffics and targeting components, cell movements and, finally, primary and secondary polar axiations involved in directional growth, differentiation and morphogenesis. Polarity spans not only pure electric and magnetic phenomena but also chemostructural (chiral), biomolecular (informational and cytoskeletal components) and spatio-temporal developmental processes. Even thoughit could be considered as an attribute of just about everything in the living and much of the inanimate world, it must be pointed out that, in its major bipolar expressions, it is in the heart of both energy and matter phenomena and it integrates the physical concepts of vectorial fields and those of biochemical-metabolic gradients and biological fields.