No Arabic abstract
Oscillation is an important cellular process that regulates timing of different vital life cycles. However, in the noisy cellular environment, oscillations can be highly inaccurate due to phase fluctuations. It remains poorly understood how biochemical circuits suppress phase fluctuations and what is the incurred thermodynamic cost. Here, we study four different types of biochemical oscillations representing three basic oscillation motifs shared by all known oscillatory systems. We find that the phase diffusion constant follows the same inverse dependence on the free energy dissipation per period for all systems studied. This relationship between the phase diffusion and energy dissipation is shown analytically in a model of noisy oscillation. Microscopically, we find that the oscillation is driven by multiple irreversible cycles that hydrolyze the fuel molecules such as ATP; the number of phase coherent periods is proportional to the free energy consumed per period. Experimental evidence in support of this universal relationship and testable predictions are also presented.
Living systems need to be highly responsive, and also to keep fluctuations low. These goals are incompatible in equilibrium systems due to the Fluctuation Dissipation Theorem (FDT). Here, we show that biological sensory systems, driven far from equilibrium by free energy consumption, can reduce their intrinsic fluctuations while maintaining high responsiveness. By developing a continuum theory of the E. coli chemotaxis pathway, we demonstrate that adaptation can be understood as a non-equilibrium phase transition controlled by free energy dissipation, and it is characterized by a breaking of the FDT. We show that the maximum response at short time is enhanced by free energy dissipation. At the same time, the low frequency fluctuations and the adaptation error decrease with the free energy dissipation algebraically and exponentially, respectively.
Intelligence is often discussed in terms of neural networks in the cerebral cortex, whose evolution has presumably been influenced by Darwinian selection. Here we present molecular evidence that one of the many kinesin motors, Kif14, has evolved to exhibit special features in its amino acid sequence that could have evolved to improve neural networks. The improvement is quantified by comparison of Kif14 sequences for 12 species. The special feature is level sets of hydrophobic extrema in water wave profiles based on several hydropathic scales. The most effective scale is a new one based on fractals, indicative of approach of globular curvatures to self-organized criticality.
We present a kinetic Monte Carlo method for simulating chemical transformations specified by reaction rules, which can be viewed as generators of chemical reactions, or equivalently, definitions of reaction classes. A rule identifies the molecular components involved in a transformation, how these components change, conditions that affect whether a transformation occurs, and a rate law. The computational cost of the method, unlike conventional simulation approaches, is independent of the number of possible reactions, which need not be specified in advance or explicitly generated in a simulation. To demonstrate the method, we apply it to study the kinetics of multivalent ligand-receptor interactions. We expect the method will be useful for studying cellular signaling systems and other physical systems involving aggregation phenomena.
Quantifying the influence of microscopic details on the dynamics of development of the overall structure of a filamentous network is important in a number of biologically relevant contexts, but it is not obvious what order parameters can be used to adequately describe this complex process. In this paper, we investigated the role of multivalent actin-binding proteins (ABPs) in reorganizing actin filaments into higher-order complex networks via a computer model of semiflexible filaments. We characterize the importance of local connectivity among actin filaments as well as the global features of actomyosin networks. We first map the networks into local graph representations and then, using principles from network-theory order parameters, combine properties from these representations to gain insight on the heterogeneous morphologies of actomyosin networks at a global level. We find that ABPs with a valency greater than two promote filament bundles and large filament clusters to a much greater extent than bivalent multilinkers. We also show that active myosin-like motor proteins promote the formation of dendritic branches from a stalk of actin bundles. Our work motivates future studies to embrace network theory as a tool to characterize complex morphologies of actomyosin detected by experiments, leading to a quantitative understanding of the role of ABPs in manipulating the self-assembly of actin filaments into unique architectures that underlie the structural scaffold of a cell relating to its mobility and shape.
We present a novel method for identifying a biochemical reaction network based on multiple sets of estimated reaction rates in the corresponding reaction rate equations arriving from various (possibly different) experiments. The current method, unlike some of the graphical approaches proposed in the literature, uses the values of the experimental measurements only relative to the geometry of the biochemical reactions under the assumption that the underlying reaction network is the same for all the experiments. The proposed approach utilizes algebraic statistical methods in order to parametrize the set of possible reactions so as to identify the most likely network structure, and is easily scalable to very complicated biochemical systems involving a large number of species and reactions. The method is illustrated with a numerical example of a hypothetical network arising form a mass transfer-type model.