Towards Enzymatic-Like Control of Cellular Physical Processes

Cellular dynamics rely on numerous physical processes, including phase separation, membrane remodeling, stress relaxation, transport and stochastic fluctuation control, which are commonly treated as passive consequences of thermodynamics, mechanics or statistical physics. Here we advance the hypothesis that living systems can actively regulate such processes through biologically produced, reusable agents that act analogously to enzymes, but target physical state transitions rather than chemical reactions. We introduce the concept of enzymatic-like control, defined as the localized and saturable lowering of kinetic, topological or statistical barriers in configuration space by endogenous cellular components. Among the many cellular physical phenomena to which this concept may apply, we focus on biomolecular condensate nucleation and dissolution as a concrete and analytically tractable example. Condensate dynamics are conceived as barrier-limited physical reactions whose kinetic rates can be selectively modulated by putative enzyme-like Phase-Kinetases without altering equilibrium phase behavior. Using hazard-based inference and survival analysis, we present simulations demonstrating how these putative enzyme-like agents could generate small effective free-energy shifts on the order of a few kT, resulting in orders-of-magnitude changes in nucleation rates and yielding explicit, falsification-oriented criteria.Our framework complements existing biochemical and mechanical models by providing a testable perspective on the active regulation of physical dynamics without invoking new chemistry or nonstandard physics. It reframes cellular organization as the selective control of physical state transitions, rather than their passive accommodation within fixed physical laws.