Thanks to NSERC, the Canada Research Chairs program, and @sfuphysics.bsky.social for supporting our research! Special thanks to @mitacscanada.bsky.social for funding Julian’s time as a visiting researcher in the Sivak Group last Summer.

Over the voltage range typical of a neuronal action potential, at low voltages the pump exhibits Maxwell-demon behavior and high efficiency, while at high voltages the pump instead operates as a conventional engine and achieves higher turnover at the cost of lower efficiency.

Remarkably, we find that sodium-potassium pumps can exhibit Maxwell-demon behavior, supporting internal information flow that enables the ion-transporting subsystem to leverage thermal fluctuations to produce useful electrochemical work.

We study sodium potassium pumps through the lens of bipartite stochastic thermodynamics, identifying and computing energy and information flows between the ATP-consuming and ion-transporting parts of these machines.

These pumps are nanoscale molecular machines that consume chemical energy to transport ions across membranes into, out of, and within cells. They are essential both for maintaining cellular homeostasis, and for propagating electrical signals in neurons.

Check it out here: doi.org/10.1146/annu... or on arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2406.10355.

Thanks to NSERC, the Canada Research Chairs program, and @sfuphysics.bsky.social for supporting our research!

We explore the free energy transduction strategies used by various evolved biological molecular machines in different contexts, and suggest possible design principles we might learn from them to help guide the engineering of synthetic nanomachines.

We focus on flows of energy and information between the components of biological machines, and highlight several possible engine configurations. One intriguing example: an “information engine” mode where one subsystem uses information to harvest heat energy from its environment.