Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Building 6C, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
J Chem Phys. 2013 Sep 28;139(12):121923. doi: 10.1063/1.4818538.
Self-replication is a capacity common to every species of living thing, and simple physical intuition dictates that such a process must invariably be fueled by the production of entropy. Here, we undertake to make this intuition rigorous and quantitative by deriving a lower bound for the amount of heat that is produced during a process of self-replication in a system coupled to a thermal bath. We find that the minimum value for the physically allowed rate of heat production is determined by the growth rate, internal entropy, and durability of the replicator, and we discuss the implications of this finding for bacterial cell division, as well as for the pre-biotic emergence of self-replicating nucleic acids.
自我复制是所有生物物种共有的能力，简单的物理直觉表明，这样的过程必然会受到熵产生的推动。在这里，我们通过推导出与热浴耦合的系统中自我复制过程产生的热量的下限，使这种直觉变得严格和量化。我们发现，物理上允许的最大热产生率由增长率、内部熵和复制子的耐久性决定，我们讨论了这一发现对细菌细胞分裂以及自我复制核酸前生物出现的影响。
