[Paper Review] Maxwell's demon in biochemical signal transduction

Sosuke Ito, Takahiro Sagawa|arXiv (Cornell University)|Jun 23, 2014

Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics3 citations

TL;DR

This paper unifies information theory and thermodynamics to show that transfer entropy quantitatively determines the robustness of biochemical signal transduction against environmental noise. By modeling cellular signaling as a feedback-controlled system akin to Maxwell's demon, the study reveals that information processing limits are governed by thermodynamic constraints, offering a new biophysical framework for understanding intracellular communication without explicit coding.

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.

Motivation & Objective

• To bridge signal transduction in cells with the principles of information thermodynamics.
• To investigate how environmental fluctuations affect the reliability of intracellular signaling.
• To identify the fundamental limits of robustness in biochemical signaling using information-theoretic measures.
• To demonstrate that transfer entropy quantifies the degree of robustness in noisy cellular environments.

Proposed method

• Modeling signal transduction as a feedback control system inspired by Maxwell's demon.
• Applying the framework of information thermodynamics to quantify the role of information in reducing entropy production.
• Using transfer entropy as a measure of information flow between signaling components.
• Deriving thermodynamic bounds on signal fidelity based on information acquisition and processing.
• Formulating the second law of thermodynamics with information to analyze cellular signaling networks.
• Analyzing systems without explicit channel coding, focusing on intrinsic information processing in living cells.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 How does information processing in biochemical signaling systems relate to thermodynamic constraints?
• RQ2 What is the fundamental limit of robustness in signal transduction under environmental fluctuations?
• RQ3 How can transfer entropy serve as a quantitative measure of robustness in intracellular communication?
• RQ4 In the absence of channel coding, how is information used to maintain signaling fidelity?
• RQ5 What role does feedback control based on molecular-level information play in minimizing thermodynamic costs?

Key findings

• The robustness of signal transduction against environmental noise is fundamentally limited by thermodynamic principles when information is used in feedback control.
• Transfer entropy quantitatively characterizes the degree of robustness in biochemical signaling pathways.
• Information acquisition and utilization in signaling reduce entropy production, enabling reliable signal transmission in noisy environments.
• The second law of thermodynamics with information provides a unified framework to analyze cellular information processing.
• The absence of explicit channel coding in biological systems does not preclude high-fidelity information transfer when feedback based on information is employed.
• The study establishes a biophysical foundation for understanding intracellular communication through the lens of information-thermodynamic duality.