Translation is one of the most fundamental processes in the biological cell. Because of the central role that translation plays across all domains of life, the enzyme that carries out this process, the ribosome, is required to process information with high accuracy. This accuracy often approaches values near unity experimentally. In this paper, we model the ribosome as an information channel and demonstrate mathematically that this biological machine has information-processing capabilities that have not been recognized previously. In particular, we calculate bounds on the ribosome's theoretical Shannon capacity and numerically approximate this capacity. Finally, by incorporating estimates on the ribosome's operation time, we show that the ribosome operates at speeds safely below its capacity, allowing the ribosome to process information with an arbitrary degree of error. Our results show that the ribosome achieves a high accuracy in line with purely information-theoretic means.

翻译：翻译是生物细胞中最基本的过程之一。由于翻译在所有生命领域中的核心作用，执行该过程的酶——核糖体——需要以高精度处理信息，其实验精度常接近理想值。本文中，我们将核糖体建模为一个信息通道，并从数学上证明这一生物机器具有此前未被识别的信息处理能力。具体而言，我们计算了核糖体理论香农容量的边界，并对其容量进行数值近似。最后，通过纳入核糖体操作时间的估算，我们证明核糖体以安全低于其容量的速度运行，从而允许核糖体以任意误差程度处理信息。我们的结果表明，核糖体达到的高精度完全符合纯信息论的机制。