Energy and information flows in biomolecular machines

Synopsis

Molecular machines carry out free-energy conversion throughout all living things. Despite functional similarities to human-engineered macroscopic machines, nanoscale machines inhabit a quite distinctive physical regime, with very strong fluctuations and conversely very strong frictional damping. I will discuss my group’s efforts to use statistical physics to understand the design principles governing effective function of biomolecular machines: we derive fundamental bounds on the performance of collections of molecular machines, apply these bounds to identify the natural efficiency of different machine components, and show that such machines must have significant information flow to be functional. These results illuminate the fundamentals of energy and information transduction at the nanoscale.