ArticlePhilosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences2017
The thermodynamic efficiency of computations made in cells across the range of life.
Article in Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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21 citing papers in PubMed, 68 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Thermodynamically consistent, reduced models of gene regulatory networks.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Why cellular computations challenge our design principles.Seminars in cell & developmental biology · 2025Review
- Assembly theory and its relationship with computational complexity.Npj complexity · 2025Article
- Is stochastic thermodynamics the key to understanding the energy costs of computation?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Fundamental constraints to the logic of living systems.Interface focus · 2024Review
- The brain-body energy conservation model of aging.Nature aging · 2024Review
- Planetary Scale Information Transmission in the Biosphere and Technosphere: Limits and Evolution.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Dissipation during the Gating Cycle of the Bacterial Mechanosensitive Ion Channel Approaches the Landauer Limit.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Diversity and metabolic energy in bacteria.FEMS microbiology letters · 2023Article
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- The Effect of the Protein Synthesis Entropy Reduction on the Cell Size Regulation and Division Size of Unicellular Organisms.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- From Molecular Recognition to the "Vehicles" of Evolutionary Complexity: An Informational Approach.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Review
- Thermodynamic Efficiency of Interactions in Self-Organizing Systems.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Impedance Matching and the Choice Between Alternative Pathways for the Origin of Genetic Coding.International journal of molecular sciences · 2020Article
- Life's Energy and Information: Contrasting Evolution of Volume- versus Surface-Specific Rates of Energy Consumption.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- Fate of Duplicated Neural Structures.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Review
- Thermodynamic efficiency of contagions: a statistical mechanical analysis of the SIS epidemic model.Interface focus · 2018Article
- Semantic information, autonomous agency and non-equilibrium statistical physics.Interface focus · 2018Article
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4 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Biological organisms must perform computation as they grow, reproduce and evolve. Moreover, ever since Landauer's bound was proposed, it has been known that all computation has some thermodynamic cost-and that the same computation can be achieved with greater or smaller thermodynamic cost depending on how it is implemented. Accordingly an important issue concerning the evolution of life is assessing the thermodynamic efficiency of the computations performed by organisms. This issue is interesting both from the perspective of how close life has come to maximally efficient computation (presumably under the pressure of natural selection), and from the practical perspective of what efficiencies we might hope that engineered biological computers might achieve, especially in comparison with current computational systems. Here we show that the computational efficiency of translation, defined as free energy expended per amino acid operation, outperforms the best supercomputers by several orders of magnitude, and is only about an order of magnitude worse than the Landauer bound. However, this efficiency depends strongly on the size and architecture of the cell in question. In particular, we show that the
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