ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2019
The thermodynamic uncertainty relation in biochemical oscillations.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Experimentally achieving minimal dissipation via thermodynamically optimal transport.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Stochastic thermodynamics for biological functions.Quantitative biology (Beijing, China) · 2025Review
- Energy partitioning in the cell cortex.Nature physics · 2024Article
- A topological mechanism for robust and efficient global oscillations in biological networks.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Limits on the evolutionary rates of biological traits.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The ups and downs of biological oscillators: a comparison of time-delayed negative feedback mechanisms.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Colloidal superionic conductors.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Improved bounds on entropy production in living systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Living systems regulate many aspects of their behaviour through periodic oscillations of molecular concentrations, which function as 'biochemical clocks.' The chemical reactions that drive these clocks are intrinsically stochastic at the molecular level, so that the duration of a full oscillation cycle is subject to random fluctuations. Their success in carrying out their biological function is thought to depend on the degree to which these fluctuations in the cycle period can be suppressed. Biochemical oscillators also require a constant supply of free energy in order to break detailed balance and maintain their cyclic dynamics. For a given free energy budget, the recently discovered 'thermodynamic uncertainty relation' yields the magnitude of period fluctuations in the most precise conceivable free-running clock. In this paper, we show that computational models of real biochemical clocks severely underperform this optimum, with fluctuations several orders of magnitude larger than the theoretical minimum. We argue that this suboptimal performance is due to the small number of internal states per molecule in these models, combined with the high level of thermodynamic force required to maintain the system in the oscillatory phase. We introduce a new model with a tunable number of internal states per molecule and confirm that it approaches the optimal precision as this number increases.
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