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Biophysics

The price of accuracy

Nature Physics volume 8, pages 361–362 (2012)Cite this article

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Biological systems can adapt to changes in their environment over a wide range of conditions, but responding quickly and accurately is energetically costly. A study pins down the relationship between energy, speed and accuracy.

Systems that are in thermodynamic equilibrium are quite literally dead. By contrast, living systems are constantly driven out of thermodynamic equilibrium by burning chemical energy. Cells use this chemical energy to generate the forces necessary to pull chromosomes apart during cell division, or to propel themselves through their environment to find food. Yet energy is used not only to perform mechanical work, but also chemical work. Biomolecules such as proteins and DNA carry out calculations to determine when a cell should divide or in which direction food can be found, by chemically and physically interacting with one another through biochemical networks. The energetic cost of such computations has so far remained obscure. Now, writing in Nature Physics, Ganhui Lan and co-workers have used an adaptive sensory system to report on the rate of energy dissipation — and its relationship with the speed and accuracy of adaptation1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pieter Rein ten Wolde is at the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (AMOLF), Science Park 104, 1098 XG Amsterdam, The Netherlands,

    Pieter Rein ten Wolde

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  1. Pieter Rein ten Wolde
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Correspondence to Pieter Rein ten Wolde.

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ten Wolde, P. The price of accuracy. Nature Phys 8, 361–362 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2302

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