Maxwell's demon in biochemical signal transduction with feedback loop

Abstract

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 researches of "Maxwell's demon" - a feedback controller that utilizes information of individual molecules - has led to a unified theory of information and thermodynamics. Here we combine these two streams of researches, 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 found 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 would open up a novel biophysical approach to understand information processing in living systems on the basis of the fundamental information-thermodynamics link.

21 pages, 12 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Work and information processing in a solvable model of Maxwell's demon
• Nonequilibrium Detailed Fluctuation Theorem for Repeated Discrete Feedback
• Thermodynamic costs of information processing in sensory adaption
• Efficiency of cellular information processing
• Fluctuation Theorem for Partially-masked Nonequilibrium Dynamics
• Second-law-like inequalities with information and their interpretations
• Thermodynamics of statistical inference by cells

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• Thermodynamic efficiency of learning a rule in neural networks
• Coupled-Double-Quantum-Dot Environmental Information Engines: A Numerical Analysis
• Dissipation in non-steady state regulatory circuits
• Work extraction, information-content and the Landauer bound in the continuous Maxwell Demon