Energetic cost of precision in biomolecular systems
I will briefly review the thermodynamic uncertainty relation (TUR), which in the past 10 years has provided new tools to infer dissipation from the measurement of precision of a fluctuation current. Applied to molecular motors, it allows for a model-free statement of an upper bound on the thermodynamic efficiency using only experimentally accessible quantities. A more recent result complements the TUR for a new class of observables, which count discrete events, such as spikes of a neuron or transitions in and out of a fluorenscent biomolecular state. While Poissonian statistics of such events is possible at zero cost (i.e., in equilibrium), any precision higher than that requires the system to be driven, at a minimal cost that increases with precision.