Phase transition in thermodynamically consistent biochemical oscillators

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that biochemical oscillations emerge through a nonequilibrium phase transition driven by thermodynamic forces, with critical behavior characterized by flux, diffusion, and distribution, and compares metrics for oscillation precision.

Contribution

It introduces a generic phase transition framework for biochemical oscillations and compares metrics for their precision, validated across three thermodynamically consistent models.

Findings

Biochemical oscillations occur only above a critical thermodynamic force.

The number of coherent oscillations better quantifies oscillation precision.

The phase transition is characterized by flux, diffusion, and stationary distribution.

Abstract

Biochemical oscillations are ubiquitous in living organisms. In an autonomous system, not influenced by an external signal, they can only occur out of equilibrium. We show that they emerge through a generic nonequilibrium phase transition, with a characteristic qualitative behavior at criticality. The control parameter is the thermodynamic force, which must be above a certain threshold for the onset of biochemical oscillations. This critical behavior is characterized by the thermodynamic flux associated with the thermodynamic force, its diffusion coefficient, and the stationary distribution of the oscillating chemical species. We discuss metrics for the precision of biochemical oscillations by comparing two observables, the Fano factor associated with the thermodynamic flux and the number of coherent oscillations. Since the Fano factor can be small even when there are no biochemical oscillations, we argue that the number of coherent oscillations is more appropriate to quantify the precision of biochemical oscillations. Our results are obtained with three thermodynamically consistent versions of known models: the Brusselator, the activator-inhibitor model, and a model for KaiC oscillations.