Maxwell's demon in biochemical signal transduction with feedback loop.
Maxwell's demon in biochemical signal transduction with feedback loop.
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DOI：
10.1038/ncomms8498
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发表时间：
2015-06-23
影响因子：
16.6
通讯作者：
Sagawa T
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Ito S;Sagawa T
活细胞中的信号转导对维持生命本身是至关重要的，其中在噪声环境中的信息传递起着重要作用。在一个完全不同的背景下，最近对麦克斯韦恶魔的密集研究--一种利用单个分子的信息的反馈控制器--导致了信息学和热力学的统一理论。在这里，我们结合这两个研究流，并表明热力学第二定律与信息揭示了信号转导对环境波动的稳健性的基本极限。特别是，我们发现，稳健性的程度是由一个称为传递熵的信息量来定量表征的。我们的信息热力学方法适用于细胞内的生物通信，与人工通信相比，生物通信中没有明确的通道编码。我们的结果可能会开辟一种新的生物物理方法，在基本信息-热力学联系的基础上理解生命系统中的信息处理。信息和热力学之间的联系体现在麦克斯韦恶魔的图形中，它是一个反馈控制器。在这里，作者将信息热力学应用于大肠杆菌趋化性的信号转导，预测其稳健性是通过传递熵来量化的。
Signal transduction in living cells is vital to maintain life itself, where information transfer in noisy environment plays a significant role. In a rather different context, the recent intensive research on ‘Maxwell's demon'—a feedback controller that utilizes information of individual molecules—have led to a unified theory of information and thermodynamics. Here we combine these two streams of research, and show that the second law of thermodynamics with information reveals the fundamental limit of the robustness of signal transduction against environmental fluctuations. Especially, we find that the degree of robustness is quantitatively characterized by an informational quantity called transfer entropy. Our information-thermodynamic approach is applicable to biological communication inside cells, in which there is no explicit channel coding in contrast to artificial communication. Our result could open up a novel biophysical approach to understand information processing in living systems on the basis of the fundamental information–thermodynamics link. The connection between information and thermodynamics is embodied in the figure of Maxwell's demon, a feedback controller. Here, the authors apply thermodynamics of information to signal transduction in chemotaxis of E. coli, predicting that its robustness is quantified by transfer entropy.