TODAY: Understanding trade-offs of biological error correction, Prof Oleg Igoshin

[chaitanya athale]

Hi all

apologies for the last minute post, however a talk of some interest to many of you.

Cheers

Chaitanya

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Speaker: Prof Oleg Igoshin

Affiliation: Department of Bioengineering, Rice University, Houston

Date and Time: 3rd February 2026 11:00 am

Venue: Cipla Seminar Hall

Title : Understanding trade-offs of biological error correction

Understanding trade-offs of biological error correction 

Prof Oleg Igoshin Professor of Bioengineering & BioSciences Rice University, Houston 

ABSTRACT

High accuracy of major biological processes relies on the ability of the participating enzymatic molecules to preferentially select the correct substrate from a pool of chemically similar substrates by activating the so-called proofreading mechanisms. While the importance of such mechanisms is widely accepted, it remains unclear how evolution has optimized biological systems. In this talk, I will describe how our theoretical framework led to new insights into kinetic proofreading, a mechanism that reduces errors below the equilibrium thermodynamic limit at the expense of increased energy dissipation and slower kinetics. Our results indicated general design principles of biological information processing that reflect a multi-objective optimization among selectivity, speed, and energetic dissipation. For proofreading steps that are not rate-limiting, systems operate near the minimal dissipation required to achieve a given error level, indicating a universal global trade-off between energetic cost and accuracy. In contrast, when proofreading steps become rate-limiting, evolutionary pressure prioritizes speed, even at the expense of increased dissipation. These trends emerge consistently across four central information-processing pathways—DNA replication, transcription, tRNA charging, and peptide elongation—suggesting a common optimization logic despite mechanistic diversity. Proofreading becomes essential in organisms with large genomes, such as coronaviruses, where acceptable error rates cannot be maintained without additional energetic investment. In transcription, the greater mechanistic complexity of the proofreading network enables operation at an optimal speed while maintaining tolerable accuracy, although transcriptional error rates remain sequence dependent due to intrinsic differences in nucleotide incorporation kinetics.

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Chaitanya Athale,
Pune, India
18° 31' N, 73° 55' E, 

18.55°N, 73.81°E, 560m.

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Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.- Philp K. Dick