Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics in Biology: From Molecular Motors to Metabolic Pathways

Doctoral thesis (2018)

Biological systems need to exchange energy and matter with their environment in order to stay functional or “alive”. This exchange has to obey the laws of thermodynamics: energy cannot be created and ... [more ▼]

Biological systems need to exchange energy and matter with their environment in order to stay functional or “alive”. This exchange has to obey the laws of thermodynamics: energy cannot be created and exchange comes at the cost of dissipation, which limits the efficiency of biological function. Additionally, subcellular processes that involve only few molecules are stochastic in their dynamics and a consistent theoretical modeling has to account for that. This dissertation connects recent development in nonequilibrium thermodynamics with approaches taken in biochemical modeling. I start by a short introduction to thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, with a special emphasis on large deviation theory and stochastic thermodynamics. Building on that, I present a general theory for the thermodynamic analysis of networks of chemical reactions that are open to the exchange of matter. As a particularly insightful concrete example I discuss the mechanochemical energy conversion in stochastic models of a molecular motor protein, and show how a similar analysis can be performed for more general models. Furthermore, I compare the dissipation in stochastically and deterministically modeled open chemical networks, and present a class of chemical networks that displays exact agreement for arbitrary abundance of chemical species and arbitrary distance from thermodynamic equilibrium. My major achievement is a thermodynamically consistent coarse-graining procedure for biocatalysts, which are ubiquitous in molecular cell biology. Finally, I discuss the thermodynamics of unbranched enzymatic chains. [less ▲]

Fluctuating currents in stochastic thermodynamics. I. Gauge invariance of asymptotic statistics

in Physical Review. E. (2015), 92(4), 042132

Stochastic thermodynamics uses Markovian jump processes to model random transitions between observable mesoscopic states. Physical currents are obtained from antisymmetric jump observables defined on the ... [more ▼]

Stochastic thermodynamics uses Markovian jump processes to model random transitions between observable mesoscopic states. Physical currents are obtained from antisymmetric jump observables defined on the edges of the graph representing the network of states. The asymptotic statistics of such currents are characterized by scaled cumulants. In the present work, we use the algebraic and topological structure of Markovian models to prove a gauge invariance of the scaled cumulant-generating function. Exploiting this invariance yields an efficient algorithm for practical calculations of asymptotic averages and correlation integrals. We discuss how our approach generalizes the Schnakenberg decomposition of the average entropy-production rate, and how it unifies previous work. The application of our results to concrete models is presented in an accompanying publication. [less ▲]

Dissipation in noisy chemical networks: The role of deficiency

in Journal of Chemical Physics (2015), 145(18), 184103

We study the effect of intrinsic noise on the thermodynamic balance of complex chemical networks subtending cellular metabolism and gene regulation. A topological network property called deficiency, known ... [more ▼]

We study the effect of intrinsic noise on the thermodynamic balance of complex chemical networks subtending cellular metabolism and gene regulation. A topological network property called deficiency, known to determine the possibility of complex behavior such as multistability and oscillations, is shown to also characterize the entropic balance. In particular, when deficiency is zero the average stochastic dissipation rate equals that of the corresponding deterministic model, where correlations are disregarded. In fact, dissipation can be reduced by the effect of noise, as occurs in a toy model of metabolism that we employ to illustrate our findings. This phenomenon highlights that there is a close interplay between deficiency and the activation of new dissipative pathways at low molecule numbers [less ▲]