Maxwell's demon in biochemical signal transduction with feedback loop

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.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  Nature Communications

• Publication date

  2014-06-23

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Physics, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1038/ncomms8498arXiv 1406.5810PMID 26099556PMCID 4557369
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• The framework is applied to intracellular communication and E. coli chemotaxis without requiring explicit channel coding.

  Confidence 0.90

  박진우 (dztg5apj7m) extraction뀨 (7c402c1b98) reviewq (76h6bfydm6) reviewJake Seo (Twitter) (bmuzj8twwb) review
• Transfer entropy quantitatively characterizes the robustness of the signaling response.

  Confidence 0.96

  박진우 (dztg5apj7m) extraction뀨 (7c402c1b98) reviewq (76h6bfydm6) reviewJake Seo (Twitter) (bmuzj8twwb) review
• The information-thermodynamic framework sets a fundamental limit on the robustness of signal transduction against environmental fluctuations.

  Confidence 0.93

  박진우 (dztg5apj7m) extraction뀨 (7c402c1b98) reviewq (76h6bfydm6) reviewJake Seo (Twitter) (bmuzj8twwb) review

• biological communication inside cells

  process, biological process

  Cell-internal signaling and information exchange among molecular components.

  Aliases: intracellular communication

  박진우 (dztg5apj7m) extraction뀨 (7c402c1b98) reviewq (76h6bfydm6) reviewJake Seo (Twitter) (bmuzj8twwb) review
• channel coding

  communication concept, method

  Explicit message encoding used in engineered communication systems to improve transmission reliability.

  Aliases: explicit channel coding

  박진우 (dztg5apj7m) extraction뀨 (7c402c1b98) reviewq (76h6bfydm6) reviewJake Seo (Twitter) (bmuzj8twwb) review
• chemotaxis of e. coli

  biological process, model system

  The bacterial movement response of Escherichia coli to chemical gradients used as the study system.

  Aliases: E. coli chemotaxis, chemotaxis in E. coli

  박진우 (dztg5apj7m) extraction뀨 (7c402c1b98) reviewq (76h6bfydm6) reviewJake Seo (Twitter) (bmuzj8twwb) review
• environmental fluctuations

  phenomenon, disturbance

  Random external disturbances in the cellular environment that perturb signaling dynamics.

  Aliases: noise, fluctuations

  박진우 (dztg5apj7m) extraction뀨 (7c402c1b98) reviewq (76h6bfydm6) reviewJake Seo (Twitter) (bmuzj8twwb) review
• second law of thermodynamics with information

  principle, theoretical framework

  A thermodynamic constraint that incorporates informational contributions when analyzing systems with feedback or measurement.

  Aliases: information thermodynamics, thermodynamics with information

  박진우 (dztg5apj7m) extraction뀨 (7c402c1b98) reviewq (76h6bfydm6) reviewJake Seo (Twitter) (bmuzj8twwb) review
• signal transduction robustness

  property, biological property

  The capacity of a signaling pathway to preserve reliable information transfer and response quality despite noisy conditions.

  Aliases: robustness of signal transduction

  박진우 (dztg5apj7m) extraction뀨 (7c402c1b98) reviewq (76h6bfydm6) reviewJake Seo (Twitter) (bmuzj8twwb) review
• transfer entropy

  information-theoretic quantity, measure

  An information-theoretic quantity that measures directed transfer of information between stochastic processes over time.

  Aliases: TE

  박진우 (dztg5apj7m) extraction뀨 (7c402c1b98) reviewq (76h6bfydm6) reviewJake Seo (Twitter) (bmuzj8twwb) review

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