Maxwell's demon in biochemical signal transduction with feedback loop

TL;DR

This paper explores how information thermodynamics, inspired by Maxwell's demon, sets fundamental limits on the robustness of cellular signal transduction amid environmental noise, using transfer entropy as a key measure.

Contribution

It introduces an information-thermodynamic framework to quantify the robustness of biological signal transduction, linking it to transfer entropy and fundamental thermodynamic principles.

Findings

Robustness of signal transduction is limited by thermodynamic laws.

Transfer entropy quantitatively characterizes signal robustness.

The approach applies to cellular communication without explicit coding.

Abstract

Signal transduction in living cells is vital to maintain life itself, where information transfer in noisy environment plays a significant role. In a rather different context, the recent intensive researches of "Maxwell's demon" - a feedback controller that utilizes information of individual molecules - has led to a unified theory of information and thermodynamics. Here we combine these two streams of researches, and show that the second law of thermodynamics with information reveals the fundamental limit of the robustness of signal transduction against environmental fluctuations. Especially, we found that the degree of robustness is quantitatively characterized by an informational quantity called transfer entropy. Our information-thermodynamic approach is applicable to biological communication inside cells, in which there is no explicit channel coding in contrast to artificial communication. Our result would open up a novel biophysical approach to understand information processing in living systems on the basis of the fundamental information-thermodynamics link.