Thermodynamic role of main reaction pathway and multi-body information flow in membrane transport

TL;DR

This paper models membrane transport as reaction pathways within a 16-state system, quantifying thermodynamic differences between passive and secondary active transport through information flow analysis.

Contribution

It extends the second law of information thermodynamics to a 16-state model, revealing how multi-body correlations differentiate transport types.

Findings

Coarse-grained information flow is positive for secondary active transport.

Four-body correlations dominate in secondary active transport.

Two-body correlations are dominant in passive transport.

Abstract

The two classes of membrane transport, namely, secondary active and passive transport, are understood as different reaction pathways in the same protein structure, described by the 16-state model in this paper. To quantify the thermodynamic difference between secondary active transport and passive transport, we extend the second law of information thermodynamics of the autonomous demon in the four-state model composed of two subsystems to the 16-state model composed of four subsystems representing the membrane transport. We reduce the 16 states to 4 states and derive the coarse-grained second law of information thermodynamics, which provides an upper bound of the free energy transport by the coarse-grained information flow. We also derive an upper bound on the free energy transport by the multi-body information flow representing the two-body or four-body correlations in the 16-state model by exploiting the cycle decomposition. The coarse-grained information flow and the multi-body information flows express the quantitative difference between secondary active and passive transport. The numerical analysis shows that the coarse-grained information flow is positive for secondary active transport and negative for passive transport. The four-body correlation is dominant in the multi-body information flows for secondary active transport. In contrast, the two-body correlation is dominant for passive transport. This result shows that both the sign of the coarse-grained information flow and the difference of the four-body correlation and the two-body correlation explain the difference of the free energy transport in secondary active and passive transport.