2016/05/31 by Elena Agliari, Adriano Barra, Lorenzo Dello Schiavo +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #cond-mat.stat-mech #nlin.SI #q-bio.MN
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/srep36314
published as Scientific Reports 6, 36314 (2016) · 24 pages, 10 figures; accepted for publication in Scientific Reports
arxiv created 2016/11/11 · arxiv updated 2021/05/26
Statistical mechanics provides an effective framework to investigate information processing in biochemical reactions. Within such framework far-reaching analogies are established among (anti-) cooperative collective behaviors in chemical kinetics, (anti-)ferromagnetic spin models in statistical mechanics and operational amplifiers/flip-flops in cybernetics. The underlying modeling -- based on spin systems -- has been proved to be accurate for a wide class of systems matching classical (e.g. Michaelis--Menten, Hill, Adair) scenarios in the infinite-size approximation. However, the current research in biochemical information processing has been focusing on systems involving a relatively small number of units, where this approximation is no longer valid. Here we show that the whole statistical mechanical description of reaction kinetics can be re-formulated via a mechanical analogy -- based on completely integrable hydrodynamic-type systems of PDEs -- which provides explicit finite-size solutions, matching recently investigated phenomena (e.g. noise-induced cooperativity, stochastic bi-stability, quorum sensing). The resulting picture, successfully tested against a broad spectrum of data, constitutes a neat rationale for a numerically effective and theoretically consistent description of collective behaviors in biochemical reactions.