DIEP seminar by Mauricio del Razo
Entropy production of biochemical processes provides a tool to quantify irreversibility and energetic costs in living systems, from molecular reactions to cellular-scale organization. The first part of this talk extends stochastic thermodynamics from well-mixed chemical master equations to spatially resolved reaction–diffusion systems, where reactive events are coupled to transport and local fluctuations. Building on this framework, the second part of the talk applies this results to spatially inhomogeneous single-enzyme kinetics driven by chemical baths, yielding potential mechanisms to explain biophysical relevant phenomena such as enhanced diffusion. The last part shows how recent field-theoretic and quantum-method formulations of stochastic reaction–diffusion systems can be harnessed to construct stochastic thermodynamic theory for mesoscopic coarse-grained descriptions that recovers well-known macroscopic results. This novel perspective yields practical and numerical tools for inferring energetic and thermodynamic properties biochemical networks from reduced, experimentally realistic descriptions, while making explicit the information loss and scale dependence of entropy production.
Mauricio del Razo is currently a group leader at the Zuse Institute Berlin and in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Freie Universität Berlin. He was previously an independent postdoctoral fellow at the University of Amsterdam in the Dutch Institute for Emergent Phenomena (DIEP) and associated to the Computational chemistry group at the Van ‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences and the Korteweg-de Vries Institute for Mathematics.
He is mainly interested in applying stochastic theory, numerical methods, nonequilibrium physics and data-driven methods to complex systems in open settings. Specifically, Mauricio develops multiscale theory and simulations of open biochemical reaction-diffusion processes, ranging from molecular to macroscopic scales. More recently, he has been delving into topics in stochastic thermodynamics and open quantum systems.
If you wish to attend this seminar online, please send an email to r.lier@uva.nl to receive the zoom-link.