Dhanuka Ankit, Flamholz Avi I, Murugan Arvind, Goyal Akshit
National Centre for Biological Sciences-TIFR, Bengaluru 560065.
The Laboratory of Environmental Microbiology, The Rockefeller University, New York NY 10065.
bioRxiv. 2025 Jun 29:2025.06.27.661910. doi: 10.1101/2025.06.27.661910.
Unlike many physical nonequilibrium systems, in biological systems, the coupling to external energy sources is not a fixed parameter but adaptively controlled by the system itself. We do not have theoretical frameworks that allow for such adaptability. As a result, we cannot understand emergent behavior in living systems where structure formation and non-equilibrium drive coevolve. Here, using ecosystems as a model of adaptive systems, we develop a framework of living circuits whose architecture changes adaptively with the energy dissipated in each circuit edge. We find that unlike traditional nonequilibrium systems, living circuits exhibit a phase transition from equilibrium death to a nonequilibrium dissipative state beyond a critical driving potential. This transition emerges through a feedback mechanism that saves the weakest edges by routing dissipation through them, even though the adaptive rule locally rewards the strongest dissipating edges. Despite lacking any global optimization principle, living circuits achieve near-maximal dissipation, with higher drive promoting more complex circuits. Our work establishes ecosystems as paradigmatic examples of living circuits whose structure and dissipation are tuned through local adaptive rules.
与许多物理非平衡系统不同，在生物系统中，与外部能量源的耦合不是一个固定参数，而是由系统本身进行自适应控制。我们没有能够考虑到这种适应性的理论框架。因此，我们无法理解生命系统中结构形成和非平衡驱动共同进化的涌现行为。在这里，我们以生态系统作为自适应系统的模型，开发了一个生命回路框架，其架构会随着每个回路边缘耗散的能量而自适应变化。我们发现，与传统非平衡系统不同，生命回路在超过临界驱动势时会表现出从平衡死亡到非平衡耗散状态的相变。这种转变通过一种反馈机制出现，该机制通过将耗散路由到最弱的边缘来拯救它们，尽管自适应规则在局部奖励最强的耗散边缘。尽管缺乏任何全局优化原则，但生命回路实现了近乎最大的耗散，更高的驱动会促进更复杂的回路。我们的工作将生态系统确立为生命回路的典范示例，其结构和耗散通过局部自适应规则进行调整。
