Compositional Proofreading through Critical Self-Tuning.

Authors

Omer Karin

Published in

Physical review letters. Volume 137. Issue 18. Pages 188401. Oct 30, 2026.

Abstract

High-dimensional multicomponent systems, including immune and epigenetic repertoires, must selectively retain rare, beneficial components while purging a large influx of suboptimal variants. I demonstrate that critical tuning of component control parameters through competition naturally implements proofreading in these systems. Competition for shared inputs pins the system to the marginal stability threshold of the most persistent species. This grants that species an extended lifetime and concentrates a macroscopic fraction of the population in that species, while forcing less-stable variants into rapid drift-driven turnover. When the aggregate drive exceeds a critical influx, pinning fails and all components enter a rapid-turnover regime. Applying this framework to biological memory, I identify the hallmarks of this effect in plasma cell accumulation dynamics and propose that altered pinning dynamics may represent failure points across biological domains, including cancer, immunodeficiencies, and the aberrant activation of harmful genomic elements during aging.

PMID:
43024927
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 14 Nov 2026.

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