Non Equilibrium Transitions in a Polymer Replication Ensemble
Statistical Mechanics
2025-02-18 v2 Biological Physics
Abstract
The fuel-driven process of replication in living systems generates distributions of copied entities with varying degrees of copying accuracy. Here we introduce a thermodynamically consistent ensemble for investigating universal population features of replicating systems. In the context of copolymer copying, coarse-graining over molecular details, we establish a phase diagram of copying accuracy. We discover sharp non-equilibrium transitions between populations of random and accurate copies. Maintaining a population of accurate copies requires a minimum energy expenditure that depends on the configurational entropy of copolymer sequences.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2403.05665,
title = {Non Equilibrium Transitions in a Polymer Replication Ensemble},
author = {Arthur Genthon and Carl D. Modes and Frank Jülicher and Stephan W. Grill},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.05665},
year = {2025}
}