Omnipresent Maxwell's demons orchestrate information management in living cells

Microbial Biotechnology
Grégory BoëlAntoine Danchin

Abstract

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.

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Citations

Jun 22, 2019·Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere : the Journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life·Marko Vitas, Andrej Dobovišek
Oct 30, 2019·Journal of Molecular Evolution·Antoine Danchin, Pablo Iván Nikel
Apr 11, 2020·Chembiochem : a European Journal of Chemical Biology·Manuel Nieto-Domínguez, Pablo I Nikel
Mar 11, 2020·Microbial Biotechnology·Antoine DanchinConghui You
Mar 19, 2020·Chembiochem : a European Journal of Chemical Biology·Antoine Danchin
Nov 7, 2019·International Journal of Molecular Sciences·Vladimir Kubyshkin, Nediljko Budisa
Oct 31, 2020·Genome Biology and Evolution·Zhihua OuAntoine Danchin
Apr 4, 2021·International Journal of Molecular Sciences·František BaluškaArthur S Reber
Sep 30, 2019·Research in Microbiology·Farès OusalemGrégory Boël
Aug 4, 2021·Current Opinion in Genetics & Development·Diedre ReitzDouglas K Bishop

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Methods Mentioned

BETA
GTPase
FRET
GTPases
protein folding

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