The energy cost for molecular synchronization: theoretical insights from cyanobacterial circadian clock

报告题目：The energy cost for molecular synchronization: theoretical insights from cyanobacterial circadian clock

报告人：张东良博士  德国马普复杂系统物理研究所

报告时间：2025年8月5日下午2:00

报告地点：物理科技楼101室

报告邀请人：赵永峰

报告摘要：Synchronization of is a collective phenomenon critical for maintaining biological rhythms, and the general dynamics have been well studied by using theoretical models (such as Kuramoto model). However, relatively little is known about how realistic molecular oscillators in cells achieve synchronization, where the underlying mechanism is governed by biochemical reactions with a small number of molecules and large fluctuations. It's also not much clear how and how much the energy is cost to counter the effects of inevitable internal noise and sustain the collective order.

The post-transcriptional cyanobacterial circadian clock, namely Kai system, can oscillate in vitro with the presence of only three type of proteins and ATP. It provides a good example to study biomolecular oscillators from many aspects, including its synchronization behavior. In this talk, I will first briefly introduce the molecular mechanism for the oscillation in Kai system, including the two possible synchronization mechanisms. Then, I will introduce two of my theoretical work on the energy cost for molecular synchronization [1][2], inspired the either of the respective mechanism. The first work studied the directly pairwise interaction (PI) between molecular oscillators [1], and the second work is focused on a less-studied indirect global coupling by altruistic resource-sharing (ARS) mechanism [2]. Finally, I will compare the common points and the differences between the two mechanism, and the insights for biomolecular clock design principle.  

[1]Zhang, D., Cao, Y., Ouyang, Q., & Tu, Y. (2020). The energy cost and optimal design for synchronization of coupled molecular oscillators. Nature physics, 16(1), 95-100.

[2]Zhang, D., Cao, Y., Ouyang, Q., & Tu, Y. (2025). Altruistic resource-sharing mechanism for synchronization: The energy-speed-accuracy tradeoff. Physical Review Letters, 135(3), 037401.

报告人简介：张东良博士目前是德国马普复杂系统物理研究所（MPIPKS）的博士后研究人员。他于 2020 年在北京大学获得博士学位，指导老师为欧阳颀教授和涂豫海研究员。他于 2024 年 9 月加入 MPI-PKS，此前曾于北京大学和清华大学进行博士后研究。他的研究兴趣主要集中于非平衡的活性过程在各种尺度上如何影响生物功能以及实现对应生物过程的能量代价是多少，研究工具主要来自生物物理的建模和数值计算以及非平衡态热力学。