Complete integrability of information processing by biochemical reactions

Agliari, Elena, Barra, Adriano, Dello Schiavo, Lorenzo and Moro, Antonio (2016) Complete integrability of information processing by biochemical reactions. Scientific Reports, 6. p. 36314. ISSN 2045-2322

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Abstract

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processing has been focusing on systems involving a relatively small number of units, where this approximation is no longer valid.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.

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