Genome complexity: amazing translation efficiency (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, November 17, 2017, 15:09 (2564 days ago) @ David Turell

Information in the genome must be translated into proteins and functions. It turns out to be amazingly efficient as compared to computer energy use:

https://phys.org/news/2017-11-astonishing-efficiency-life.html

"All life on earth performs computations – and all computations require energy. From single-celled amoeba to multicellular organisms like humans, one of the most basic biological computations common across life is translation: processing information from a genome and writing that into proteins.

"Translation, it turns out, is highly efficient.

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"To discover just how efficient translation is, the researchers started with Landauer's Bound. This is a principle of thermodynamics establishing the minimum amount of energy that any physical process needs to perform a computation.

"'What we found is that biological translation is roughly 20 times less efficient than the absolute lower physical bound," says lead author Christopher Kempes, an SFI Omidyar Fellow. "And that's about 100,000 times more efficient than a computer." DNA replication, another basic computation common across life, is about 165 times worse than Landauer's Bound. "That's not as efficient as biological translation, but still stunningly good compared to computers."

"Scaling up to calculate the thermodynamic efficiency of higher-level biological computations like thought, and to understand how important efficiency is to natural selection, offer challenging questions for further research."

Comment: Life maintains its homeostasis through the genome. Limiting the energy required helps life survive its requirement for a constant energy addition. When life originated it is unlikely the process stumbled into this efficiency by chance. It was designed.