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Engineering Approaches to Biomolecular Motors: From in vitro to in vivo Friday Speaker Abstracts
31
Efficient Molecular-scale Energy Transmission
David A. Sivak
.
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada.
Given the centrality of energy transmission in the function of molecular motors, it seems
plausible that evolution has sculpted these rapid-turnover machines to efficiently transmit energy
in their natural contexts, where stochastic fluctuations are large and nonequilibrium driving
forces are strong. But what are the physical limits on such nonequilibrium efficiency? And what
machine designs would actually achieve these limits? Toward a systematic picture of efficient
stochastic nonequilibrium energy transmission, I address two related fundamental questions in
nonequilibrium statistical mechanics: How do we predict the response of molecular-scale soft-
matter systems to rapid nonequilibrium driving? And how do we identify the driving that most
efficiently (yet rapidly) carries such a noisy system from one state to another? These abstract
theoretical considerations have immediate consequences for the design of single-molecule
biophysical experiments and molecular simulations, and nontrivial yet intuitive implications for
the design principles of molecular-scale energy transmission out of equilibrium, which I
illustrate through application to simple model systems.