Statistical physics of self-replication.

Self-replication is a capacity common to every species of living thing, and simple physical intuition dictates that such a process must invariably be fueled by the production of entropy. Here, we undertake to make this intuition rigorous and quantitative by deriving a lower bound for the amount of heat that is produced during a process of self-replication in a system coupled to a thermal bath. We find that the minimum value for the physically allowed rate of heat production is determined by the growth rate, internal entropy, and durability of the replicator, and we discuss the implications of this finding for bacterial cell division, as well as for the pre-biotic emergence of self-replicating nucleic acids.

• Publication year

  2012

• Venue

  Journal of Chemical Physics

• Publication date

  2012-09-06

• Fields of study

  Biology, Mathematics, Physics, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1063/1.4818538arXiv 1209.1179PMID 24089735
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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