Foundation grantees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have taken one step toward understanding how a process or fluctuation in a biological cell influences its performance.
By pinpointing the energy expended by a cell, these researchers can set boundaries on fluctuations in its behavior. Conversely, given a range of fluctuations in the rate of a motor protein’s rotation, for example, the researchers can determine the minimum amount of energy the cell must be expending to drive this rotation.
"This ends up being a very powerful, general statement about what is physically possible, or what is not physically possible, in a microscopic system,” says Jeremy England, the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Assistant Professor of Physics at MIT. “It’s also a generally applicable design constraint for the architecture of anything you want to make at the nanoscale."
Read the full article here.
Message sent
Thank you for sharing.