Statistical physics of self-replication
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england.pdf
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317.88 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
27a8a4c3ee5095cc31bfc675e4439019
Author(s)
England, Jeremy L.
Date Issued
August 2013
Journal
The Journal of Chemical Physics
Publisher
American Institute of Physics (AIP)
Citation
England, Jeremy L. “Statistical Physics of Self-Replication.” The Journal of Chemical Physics 139, no. 12 (2013): 121923.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Self-replication is a capacity common to every species of living thing, and simple physical intuition dictates that such a process must invariably be fueled by the production of entropy. Here, we undertake to make this intuition rigorous and quantitative by deriving a lower bound for the amount of heat that is produced during a process of self-replication in a system coupled to a thermal bath. We find that the minimum value for the physically allowed rate of heat production is determined by the growth rate, internal entropy, and durability of the replicator, and we discuss the implications of this finding for bacterial cell division, as well as for the pre-biotic emergence of self-replicating nucleic acids.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4818538
