The Energetic Costs of Cellular Computation (2012)

Researchers Mehta and Schwab calculate that cells must consume energy to perform computations, such as detecting chemical concentrations in their environment, with greater computational accuracy requiring more energy expenditure. Their analysis of a simple cellular network demonstrates that learning external information necessitates breaking thermodynamic equilibrium, suggesting that energy costs of cellular computation may significantly constrain network function in resource-limited environments like bacterial spore germination.