Wednesday 27th January  15h00:
Pierre Gaspard (Center for Nonlinear Phenomena and Complex Systems, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium ).
The physico-chemical principles of information processing in biophysical nanosystems.

Abstract:

Abstract:
At the molecular level, a natural support of information is provided by copolymers such as DNA in biological systems. If the storage of information in the covalent bonds of copolymers guarantees its stability over long periods of time, the processing of information, e.g. during replication, requires nonequilibrium conditions consuming free energy (about 2 ATP molecules/nucleotides) and is affected by thermal and molecular fluctuations prevailing at the nanoscale.  Recent advances in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and thermodynamics are shown
to be fundamental to understand these biophysical processes on the basis of physico-chemical laws.

References:

• P. Gaspard, Temporal ordering of nonequilibrium fluctuations as a corollary of the second law of thermodynamics, Comptes Rendus Physique 8 (2007) 598-608.
  

• D. Andrieux and P. Gaspard, Nonequilibrium generation of information in copolymerization processes, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 105 (2008) 516-9521.
  

• D. Andrieux and P. Gaspard, Molecular information processing in nonequilibrium copolymerizations, J. Chem. Phys. 130 (2009) 014901.
  

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