Energy efficiency is closely related to the evolution of biological systems and is important to their information processing. In this work, we calculate the excitation probability of a simple model of a bistable biolo...Energy efficiency is closely related to the evolution of biological systems and is important to their information processing. In this work, we calculate the excitation probability of a simple model of a bistable biological unit in response to pulsatile inputs, and its spontaneous excitation rate due to noise perturbation. Then we analytically calculate the mutual information, energy cost, and energy efficiency of an array of these bistable units. We find that the optimal number of units could maximize this array＇s energy efficiency in encoding pulse inputs, which depends on the fixed energy cost. We conclude that demand for energy efficiency in biological systems may strongly influence the size of these systems under the pressure of natural selection.展开更多
基金Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos 11105062 and 11265014the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant Nos LZUJBKY-2011-57 and LZUJBKY-2015-119
文摘Energy efficiency is closely related to the evolution of biological systems and is important to their information processing. In this work, we calculate the excitation probability of a simple model of a bistable biological unit in response to pulsatile inputs, and its spontaneous excitation rate due to noise perturbation. Then we analytically calculate the mutual information, energy cost, and energy efficiency of an array of these bistable units. We find that the optimal number of units could maximize this array＇s energy efficiency in encoding pulse inputs, which depends on the fixed energy cost. We conclude that demand for energy efficiency in biological systems may strongly influence the size of these systems under the pressure of natural selection.
