The thermodynamic efficiency of computations made in cells across the range of life
Open accessAbstract
Biological organisms must perform computation as they grow, reproduce and evolve. Moreover, ever since Landauer’s bound was proposed, it has been known that all computation has some thermodynamic cost—and that the same computation can be achieved with greater or smaller thermodynamic cost depending on how it is implemented. Accordingly an important issue concerning the evolution of life is assessing the thermodynamic efficiency of the computations performed by organisms. This issue is interesting both from the perspective of how close life has come to maximally efficient computation (presumably under the pressure of natural selection), and from the practical perspective of what efficiencies we might hope that engineered biological computers might achieve, especially in comparison with current computational systems. Here we show that the computational efficiency of translation, defined as free energy expended per amino acid operation, outperforms the best supercomputers by several orders of magnitude, and is only about an order of magnitude worse than the Landauer bound. However, this efficiency depends strongly on the size and architecture of the cell in question. In particular, we show that the useful efficiency of an amino acid operation, defined as the bulk energy per amino acid polymerization, decreases for increasing bacterial size and converges to the polymerization cost of the ribosome. This cost of the largest bacteria does not change in cells as we progress through the major evolutionary shifts to both single- and multicellular eukaryotes. However, the rates of total computation per unit mass are non-monotonic in bacteria with increasing cell size, and also change across different biological architectures, including the shift from unicellular to multicellular eukaryotes. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Reconceptualizing the origins of life’.
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The synthesis of organized biological machinery from simpler, disconnected components involves a large reduction in entropy.
“Entropy reduction also comes by growth: the synthesis of organized biological machinery from simpler, disconnected components—for example, as done by the ribosome during the synthesis of proteins—involves a large reduction in entropy [77].”
From Fundamental constraints to the logic of living systems (2024) · cites this paper as [77]
The energy usage of the ribosome is only one or two orders of magnitude above Landauer's bound.
“it has been shown that the energy usage of the ribosome is only one or two orders of magnitude above this bound [77].”
From Fundamental constraints to the logic of living systems (2024) · cites this paper as [77]
The fundamental bounds of information can be connected to metabolism via Landauer's bound by calculating the minimal metabolic rate W needed to replicate genetic information given a genome length and desired cellular growth rate.
“One can easily connect the fundamental bounds of information to metabolism via Landauer’s bound, by calculating the minimal metabolic rate W needed to replicate genetic information given a genome length and desired cellular growth rate [77].”
From Fundamental constraints to the logic of living systems (2024) · cites this paper as [77]
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- Authors
- Kempes, C. P., Wolpert, D., Cohen, Z., & Pérez-Mercader, J.
- Affiliations
- Santa Fe Institute (US)
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (US)
- Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
- Corresponding author
- Kempes, Christopher P.
- Venue
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
- Publisher
- The Royal Society
- Published
- 2017-11-13
- Volume
- 375
- Issue
- 2109
- Pages
- 20160343
- ISSN
- 1364-503X (ISSN-L)
- 1471-2962
- PMC
- PMC5686401
- OpenAlex
- W2626835270
- Cited by
- 68
- References
- 124
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 6 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 2
- FWCI
- 2.01
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Funders
- Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF0079/AB47)
- FQXi Foundation (FQXi-RHl3-1349)
- U.S. National Science Foundation (CHE-1648973)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › RNA and protein synthesis mechanisms
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Astronomy and Astrophysics › Origins and Evolution of Life
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Statistical and Nonlinear Physics › Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics
- Keywords
- thermodynamic cost of computation, Landauer bound, biological computation, translation efficiency, ribosome, bacterial cell size, multicellular eukaryotes, origin of life, biological computers
- MeSH terms
- Cells, Biological Evolution, Thermodynamics, Protein Biosynthesis, Life
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