Toward a thermodynamics of energy and information processing in the cell

Abstract

I will start by a brief overview of recent developments in nonequilibrium thermodynamics and show how they establish clear connections between energetics and information theory. I will then show how this enabled the study of various simple subcellular processes (e.g. enzymes and molecular motors). I will then focus on recent developments which extended these results to describe large chemical reaction networks and show how they can be used to study the cost for creating dissipative structures such as Turing patterns and chemical waves.