How Genetic Information Keeps Cells Alive: A New Model from Moffitt Cancer Center

How Genetic Information Keeps Cells Alive: A New Model from Moffitt Cancer Center

Key Highlights

• Left to the laws of physics, molecules inside a cell would drift toward disorder (entropy). Yet cellsmaintainan extraordinary level of organization.
  • A new model explains how genetic information is not just stored but continuously used to keep cells organized and functioning.
  • Enzymes, which are formed from genetic instructions, drive essential chemical reactions at life sustaining speeds without dangerously increasing temperature.
  • As proteins, including enzymes, fold into precise three-dimensional shapes, they gain the information and structure needed to reliably carry out these reactions.
  • The Moffitt model brings these well known elements together in a new way, showing how enzyme activity actively steers cellular chemistry toward order and away from randomness.

TAMPA, Fla. (April 13, 2026) - A Moffitt Cancer Center researcher has introduced a new model that addresses one of biology's most fundamental questions: How does genetic information keep living systems organized and therefore alive?

The Perspectives article, by Robert A. Gatenby, M.D., co-director of Moffitt's Center of Excellence for Evolutionary Therapy and lead author of the study published in Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, speaks to a longstanding puzzle: Cells remain highly structured and functional even though physical systems naturally tend toward disorder, a process known as entropy. It is clear that cells use information in their genes to maintain order, but the general principles and specific mechanisms that allow this have never been fully explained.

Scientists have long been able to explain parts of this process. Gatenby's model builds on this foundation but reframes the problem. Rather than viewing genetic information as stationary, the model treats it as constantly at work in the cell. This activity shows up through enzymes, which influence how cellular processes unfold in real time.

Enzymes, which are proteins built from genes, are essential to maintain the chemical reactions that keep cells functioning. Critically, they significantly speed up reactions without raising the temperature in cells, which could damage proteins and render them useless for life.

Scientists have long understood these properties. The new Moffitt model adds a broader interpretation of their impact: Enzymes don't just make chemical reactions happen faster; they make some reactions far more likely than others. They do this in part by attaching to certain molecules and holding them in place. This makes certain reactions far more likely than others, helping keep the system intact instead of veering off into the disorder that physics alone would predict (entropy).

Additionally, the model provides a novel perspective on protein folding. Folding transforms a simple chain of amino acids into a precise three-dimensional shape that can carry out specific tasks.

In principle, these chains could fold in many different ways. In reality, cells almost always produce the version that works. In the Gatenby framework, this outcome is the result of the folding process bringing different parts of the molecule into contact with each other, even if they started out far apart. Proteins gain a stable structure thanks to these interactions, leaving enzymes with the shape they need to carry out important chemical reactions again and again.

Q&A with Robert Gatenby, M.D., sole author of the study and chair of the Integrated Mathematical Oncology Department at Moffitt Cancer Center

What prompted you to develop this model?
I've long been interested in the connections between biology, physics and information since reading an article on Maxwell's demon and information theory in Scientific American when I was 16 years old. Although we know that genes contain critical information, it is not fully clear how this information is translated into the bodily functions that sustain cell life. This model is an effort to make a logical connection between those parts.

What role do enzymes play in that connection?
Life relies on thousands of chemical reactions. When cells respond to a problem, they often must accelerate many of these reactions. However, ordinarily, reaction rates can only be increased by raising the temperature, but even a modest increase can damage proteins and disrupt cellular structures. To solve this problem, life has developed enzymes to accelerate chemical reactions without relying on heat. The model extends the effects of the enzyme by showing that, by speeding up reactions, they change the cell's internal chemistry as if it were in a high temperature environment. This difference indicates that the cell is out of equilibrium with its environment, a necessary condition for life to exist.

Why is protein folding a central part of the story?
Our genes don't directly encode a protein - rather the information in the gene is translated into a string of different amino acids (the constituent parts of a protein). To perform some function, this string must fold on itself to form a 3D protein. In other words, a protein's function depends on its shape. However, the folding process is very complicated so that any string of amino acids can potentially form hundreds or thousands of shapes, but only one of these can perform the function. The interesting thing is that cells use other proteins to control this folding so that it consistently produces the functioning shape even though many alternatives are possible. Using information theory, this control of protein folding to only one functional shape results in a gain of information. This is critical because that added information enables molecules in the enzymes to act on much smaller quantum interactions that can control reactions without raising the temperature.

Does this model have implications for biology?

A central mystery in biology is how a single cell (for example, a fertilized egg) can contain enough information to generate a complex organism, so that an average gene contains around 2000 bits of information. The human genome, for example, is very complex and contains about 30 billion bits of information. But an adult human body contains 40 trillion cells, and no information is added to the genome during development. This results in a ridiculously small number - less than 0.001 bits per cell. Added information during protein can be viewed as the result of communication among the amino acids that can occur only when the line of amino acids can fold into a 3D shape. Similarly, as the fertilized egg begins to proliferate into a 3-dimensional tissue, communication among the cells that can be encoded by the genome allows a gain of information that precisely controls the shape of the growing tissue as it progresses from the fetus to a baby to an adolescent and to an adult. Like the folded protein, these precise shapes are otherwise improbable, allowing a steady increase in information.

Does your model have implications for patient care?
In this model, the structure and function of normal tissue is maintained by information exchanged across the cells within the tissue. Here, cancer cells develop because they stop communicating with other cells in the tissue or because the normal tissue stops communicating with them due to, for example, injury, infection, or aging. As these disconnected cells proliferate, they form more randomly organized tissue that continues to draw resources from the body but does not function and, therefore, provides no benefit. Understanding why and how the loss of communication occurs and find strategies to prevent or restore this represents a treatment model different from the usual approaches which simply to kill the cancer population.

This work was supported by the National Cancer Institute (U54 CA143970).

About Moffitt Cancer Center

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