Sommaire:

We consider the replication of a polymer template via the active template-directed assembly and disassembly of monomeric building blocks, which consumes fuel energy (ATP). This process competes with the passive spontaneous assembly and disassembly of monomers, which produces random polymer sequences. We obtain a phase diagram for the accuracy of the polymer copies, measured by their mean monomer error fraction. A non-equilibrium phase transition between accurate and inaccurate copies of the template is observed when the driving fuel energy is varied. In this transition, the fuel energy threshold depends on the complexity (entropy) of the polymer and is thus akin to Landauer’s principle. A cost-accuracy trade-off is observed as a function of the number of monomer types, which could be a small step towards understanding why the genetic alphabet uses four letters.

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