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Abstract

Biochemical oscillations are prevalent in living organisms. Systems with a small number of constituents cannot sustain coherent oscillations for an indefinite time because of fluctuations in the period of oscillation. We show that the number of coherent oscillations that quantifies the precision of the oscillator is universally bounded by the thermodynamic force that drives the system out of equilibrium and by the topology of the underlying biochemical network of states. Our results are valid for arbitrary Markov processes, which are commonly used to model biochemical reactions. We apply our results to a model for a single KaiC protein and to an activator-inhibitor model that consists of several molecules. From a mathematical perspective, based on strong numerical evidence, we conjecture a universal constraint relating the imaginary and real parts of the first nontrivial eigenvalue of a stochastic matrix.