title: Reducing intrinsic biochemical noise in cells and its thermodynamic limit.
abstract: In living cells, the specificity of biomolecular recognition can be amplified and the noise from non-specific interactions can be reduced at the expense of cellular free energy. This is the seminal idea in the Hopfield-Ninio theory of kinetic proofreading: The specificity is increased via cyclic network kinetics without altering molecular structures and equilibrium affinites. We show a thermodynamic limit of the specificity amplification with a given amount of available free energy. For a normal cell under physiological condition with sustained phosphorylation potential, this gives a factor of 10(10) as the upper bound in specificity amplification. We also study an optimal kinetic network design that is capable of approaching the thermodynamic limit.
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA. qian@amath.washington.edu
authors.forename: Hong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Qian
mesh_terms: D002477:Cells / Q000378:metabolism*; D004734:Energy Metabolism; D007700:Kinetics; D008954:Models, Biological; D008967:Molecular Biology; D010766:Phosphorylation; D013816:Thermodynamics