CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Complex systems such as ecosystems, societies, brains and cells are the consequence of nonlinear interactions between their constitutive elements. It has been pointed out that complex behavior emerges when systems are poised at the critical point of a second-order phase transition, and if that is the case, no typical scale in which the system´s properties can be described exists. Recently, it was found that the average abundances of metabolic species within cells follow a power-law distribution, suggesting that biological processes at the very cellular level could be described as critical. Following these reasoning, here we explore the possibility that the mitochondrial network in neurons is in some way poised at criticality, given that the length distribution follows a power law. Moreover, we evaluate if this distribution can be generalize for other cellular types (universality), and if, in fact, the absence of such a power law distribution can be correlated with pathology.