The channel capacity of the ribosome

TL;DR

This paper models the ribosome as an information channel, calculates its Shannon capacity, and shows it operates near theoretical limits, explaining its high accuracy in biological translation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel information-theoretic model of the ribosome, deriving bounds on its capacity and demonstrating its near-optimal information processing capabilities.

Findings

Ribosome has a high Shannon capacity close to theoretical maximum.

It operates below capacity, enabling near-perfect accuracy.

The model explains the high fidelity of biological translation.

Abstract

Translation is one of the most fundamental processes in the biological cell. Because of the central role that translation plays across all domains of life, the enzyme that carries out this process, the ribosome, is required to process information with high accuracy. This accuracy often approaches values near unity experimentally. In this paper, we model the ribosome as an information channel and demonstrate mathematically that this biological machine has information-processing capabilities that have not been recognized previously. In particular, we calculate bounds on the ribosome's theoretical Shannon capacity and numerically approximate this capacity. Finally, by incorporating estimates on the ribosome's operation time, we show that the ribosome operates at speeds safely below its capacity, allowing the ribosome to process information with an arbitrary degree of error. Our results show that the ribosome achieves a high accuracy in line with purely information-theoretic means.