The energy costs of biological insulators

Abstract

Biochemical signaling pathways can be insulated from impedance and competition effects through enzymatic "futile cycles" which consume energy, typically in the form of ATP. We hypothesize that better insulation necessarily requires higher energy consumption, and provide evidence, through the computational analysis of a simplified physical model, to support this hypothesis.

16 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (2)

• The Energetic Costs of Cellular Computation
• Fan-out in Gene Regulatory Networks

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Landauer in the age of synthetic biology: energy consumption and information processing in biochemical networks
• Remarks on the energy costs of insulators in enzymatic cascades
• Implementing Non-Equilibrium Networks with Active Circuits of Duplex Catalysts