2020/03/31 by Jonas H. Fritz, Basile Nguyen, Udo Seifert · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.stat-mech #physics.bio-ph #physics.chem-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1063/5.0006115
published as J. Chem. Phys. 152, 235101 (2020) · 8 pages, 5 figures
arxiv created 2020/05/29 · arxiv updated 2020/06/17
Biomolecular processes are typically modeled using chemical reaction networks coupled to infinitely large chemical reservoirs. A difference in chemical potential between these reservoirs can drive the system into a non-equilibrium steady state (NESS). In reality, these processes take place in finite systems containing a finite number of molecules. In such systems, a NESS can be reached with the help of an externally driven pump for which we introduce a simple model. Crucial parameters are the pumping rate and the finite size of the chemical reservoir. We apply this model to a simple biochemical oscillator, the Brusselator, and quantify the performance using the number of coherent oscillations. As a surprising result, we find that higher precision can be achieved with finite-size reservoirs even though the corresponding current fluctuations are larger than in the ideal infinite case.