Figure 5.

The role of metabolism in cellular homeostasis. Various steady states of biological systems, which have emerged to maintain biological equilibrium far from thermodynamic equilibrium, attract non-spontaneous processes to increase order, whereas thermodynamic equilibrium attracts spontaneous processes to decrease order. The trajectory between these two biochemical system phases is controlled by metabolism, where anabolism dominated by non-spontaneous processes, and catabolism dominated by spontaneous processes, are coupled mostly using ATP as a shared medium.