Pr Arvind Murugan from University of Chicago at CBI for a chaire Joliot. He will present his work below, Wednesday 18th of June at 11h, amphi CHARPAK:
Evolution of error-correction through a need for speed.
Physicists have long seen life as a non-equilibrium process that fights the 2nd law of thermodynamics by maintaining order. While we understand how extant biological Maxwell Demons work, much less is known about how such Demons come into existence in the first place. Using theoretical and experimental work on the molecular machinery that copies DNA-based information, we suggest that surprisingly little might be needed – proofreading mechanisms that maintain non-equilibrium order can potentially arise due to selection for faster replication, even if the order itself is not beneficial in any way. We argue that evolution of error correction through a need for speed might also be relevant for any high-dimensional disordered process that creates a wide variance in the distribution of completion times such as self-assembly. Our work suggests the intriguing possibility that non-equilibrium order can arise more easily than assumed, as a byproduct of fast self-replication, even before that order is directly functional.