Related papers: Thermodynamics of Darwinian selection in molecular…
Life evolved on our planet by means of a combination of Darwinian selection and innovations leading to higher levels of complexity. The emergence and selection of replicating entities is a central problem in prebiotic evolution. Theoretical…
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…
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has long been an area of substantial interest to ecologists because most fundamental biological processes, such as protein synthesis and respiration, are inherently energy-consuming. Microbial communities are…
We obtain general inequalities constraining the difference between the average of an arbitrary function of a phenotypic trait, which includes the fitness landscape of the trait itself, in the presence or in the absence of natural selection.…
In a well-known paper, Jeremy England derived a bound on the free energy dissipated by a self-replicating system [England, "Statistical physics of self-replication", The Journal of Chemical Physics, 2013]. This bound is usually interpreted…
We study self-replicating molecules under externally varying conditions. Changing conditions such as temperature variations and/or alterations in the environment's resource composition lead to both non-constant replication and decay rates…
Understanding the thermodynamics of the duplication process is a fundamental step towards a comprehensive physical theory of biological systems. However, the immense complexity of real cells obscures the fundamental tensions between energy…
Thermodynamic selection is an indirect competition between agents feeding on the same energy resource and obeying the laws of thermodynamics. We examine scenarios of this selection, where the agent is modeled as a heat-engine coupled to two…
In the past years, a remarkable mapping has been found between the dynamics of a population of M individuals undergoing random mutations and selection, and that of a single system in contact with a thermal bath with temperature 1/M. This…
The metabolic processes complexity is at the heart of energy conversion in living organisms and forms a huge obstacle to develop tractable thermodynamic metabolism models. By raising our analysis to a higher level of abstraction, we develop…
In this paper, we discuss the fitness landscape evolution of permanent replicator systems using a hypothesis that the specific time of evolutionary adaptation of the system parameters is much slower than the time of internal evolutionary…
A previously established multiscale population genetics model states that fitness can be inferred from the physical properties of proteins under the physiological assumption that a loss of stability by any protein confers the lethal…
We present a simple physical model that recapitulates several features of biological evolution, while being based only on thermally-driven attachment and detachment of elementary building blocks. Through its dynamics, this model samples a…
Darwinian evolution can be modeled in general terms as a flow in the space of fitness (i.e. reproductive rate) distributions. In the diffusion approximation, Tsimring et al. have showed that this flow admits "fitness wave" solutions:…
We provide a non-equilibrium thermodynamic description of the life-cycle of a droplet based, chemically feasible, system of protocells. By coupling the protocells metabolic kinetics with its thermodynamics, we demonstrate how the system can…
We consider a particular instance of the lift of controlled systems recently proposed in the theory of irreversible thermodynamics and show that it leads to a variational principle for an optimal control in the sense of Pontryagin. Then we…
Conformational fluctuations are believed to play an important role in the process by which transcription factor proteins locate and bind their target site on the genome of a bacterium. Using a simple model, we show that the binding time can…
Living cells use readout molecules to record the state of receptor proteins, similar to measurements or copies in typical computational devices. But is this analogy rigorous? Can cells be optimally efficient, and if not, why? We show that,…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
Human-created engines and evolutionarily optimized molecular motors exhibit sophisticated design in order to harvest chemical or thermal energy for generating unidirectional motion. The complexity of these motors makes their random…