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- Title
Omnipresent Maxwell's demons orchestrate information management in living cells.
- Authors
Boël, Grégory; Danot, Olivier; Lorenzo, Victor; Danchin, Antoine
- Abstract
Summary: The development of synthetic biology calls for accurate understanding of the critical functions that allow construction and operation of a living cell. Besides coding for ubiquitous structures, minimal genomes encode a wealth of functions that dissipate energy in an unanticipated way. Analysis of these functions shows that they are meant to manage information under conditions when discrimination of substrates in a noisy background is preferred over a simple recognition process. We show here that many of these functions, including transporters and the ribosome construction machinery, behave as would behave a material implementation of the information‐managing agent theorized by Maxwell almost 150 years ago and commonly known as Maxwell's demon (MxD). A core gene set encoding these functions belongs to the minimal genome required to allow the construction of an autonomous cell. These MxDs allow the cell to perform computations in an energy‐efficient way that is vastly better than our contemporary computers. Synthetic biology calls for accurate understanding of the critical functions that operate living cells. Many, including transporters and the ribosome construction machinery, behave as a material implementation of the intelligent widget known as Maxwell's demon (MxD).
- Subjects
SYNTHETIC biology; MAXWELL'S demon; CELL analysis; CARRIER proteins; RIBOSOME structure
- Publication
Microbial Biotechnology, 2019, Vol 12, Issue 2, p210
- ISSN
1751-7907
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/1751-7915.13378