UMR 8261 CNRS-University Paris Diderot, Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique, 13 rue Pierre et Marie Curie, 75005, Paris, France.
Institut Pasteur, 25-28 rue du Docteur Roux, 75724, Paris Cedex 15, France.
Microb Biotechnol. 2019 Mar;12(2):210-242. doi: 10.1111/1751-7915.13378.
The development of synthetic biology calls for accurate understanding of the critical functions that allow construction and operation of a living cell. Besides coding for ubiquitous structures, minimal genomes encode a wealth of functions that dissipate energy in an unanticipated way. Analysis of these functions shows that they are meant to manage information under conditions when discrimination of substrates in a noisy background is preferred over a simple recognition process. We show here that many of these functions, including transporters and the ribosome construction machinery, behave as would behave a material implementation of the information-managing agent theorized by Maxwell almost 150 years ago and commonly known as Maxwell's demon (MxD). A core gene set encoding these functions belongs to the minimal genome required to allow the construction of an autonomous cell. These MxDs allow the cell to perform computations in an energy-efficient way that is vastly better than our contemporary computers.
合成生物学的发展需要准确理解允许构建和操作活细胞的关键功能。除了编码普遍存在的结构外，最小基因组还编码了大量以意想不到的方式消耗能量的功能。对这些功能的分析表明，它们旨在管理信息，在这种情况下，与简单的识别过程相比，更倾向于在嘈杂的背景下区分底物。我们在这里表明，这些功能中的许多功能，包括转运蛋白和核糖体构建机制，其行为方式与 Maxwell 近 150 年前提出的、通常被称为 Maxwell 恶魔 (MxD) 的信息管理代理的物质实现方式相似。一组核心基因编码这些功能，属于允许构建自主细胞所需的最小基因组。这些 MxD 使细胞能够以比我们现代计算机高得多的效率进行节能计算。
