Yuhai Tu IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Nonequilibirum Thermodynamics of Biochemical Circuits: Some Recent Results
A central problem in biology is how living systems manage to perform vital functions (e.g., replication, development, computing, etc.) accurately by using inherently stochastic biochemical circuits to process highly noisy information. What are the molecular mechanisms to control noise for accurate information processing? What is the energy cost for implementing these molecular mechanisms? In this talk, we will first present some of our recent work in addressing these two related general questions in the context of synchronization of molecular oscillators [1]. In the second part of the talk, we investigate the scaling behavior of the energy dissipation rate in biochemical networks. By developing a coarse-graining process in (chemical and physical) state space and a corresponding renormalization procedure for reaction rates, we find that energy dissipation rate has an inverse power-law dependence on the number of microscopic states in a coarse-grained state [2].
[1] “Nonequilibrium thermodynamics of coupled molecular oscillators: The energy cost and optimal design for synchronization”, D. Zhang, Y. Cao, Q. Ouyang, and Y. Tu, Nature Physics, 16, 95-100, 2020.
[2] “Scaling of Energy Dissipation in Nonequilibrium Reaction Networks”, Qiwei Yu, D. Zhang, and Y. Tu, Phys. Rev. Lett. (PRL),126, 080601, 2021.
Video of the lecture
