Related papers: Cell development obeys maximum Fisher information
The inherent stochasticity of cellular processes leads to significant cell-to-cell variation in protein abundance. Although this noise has already been characterized and modeled, its broader implications and significance remain unclear. In…
The brain constructs population codes to represent stimuli through widely distributed patterns of activity across neurons. An important figure of merit of population codes is how much information about the original stimulus can be decoded…
The estimation of continuous parameters from measured data plays a central role in many fields of physics. A key tool in understanding and improving such estimation processes is the concept of Fisher information, which quantifies how…
Cells control their size to cope with noise during growth and division. Eukaryotic cells exhibiting "sizer" control (targeting a specific size before dividing) may rely on molecular concentration thresholds, but simple implementations of…
Information delivery via molecular signals is abundant in nature and potentially useful for industry sensing. Many propagation channels (e.g., tissue membranes and catalyst beds) contain porous medium materials and the impact this has on…
We address the fundamental limits of learning unknown parameters of any stochastic process from time-series data, and discover exact closed-form expressions for how optimal inference scales with observation length. Given a parametrized…
The prevalence of multicellular organisms is due in part to their ability to form complex structures. How cells pack in these structures is a fundamental biophysical issue, underlying their functional properties. However, much remains…
Living cells can enhance their fitness by anticipating environmental change. We study how accurately linear signaling networks in cells can predict future signals. We find that maximal predictive power results from a combination of…
Experiments show that cellular uptake of nanoparticles, via receptor-mediated endocytosis, strongly depends on nanoparticle size. There is an optimal size, approximately 50 nm in diameter, at which cellular uptake is the highest. In…
Given the stochastic nature of gene expression, genetically identical cells exposed to the same environmental inputs will produce different outputs. This heterogeneity has been hypothesized to have consequences for how cells are able to…
The metabolic network plays a crucial role in regulating bacterial metabolism and growth, but it is subject to inherent molecular stochasticity. Previous studies have utilized flux balance analysis and the maximum entropy method to predict…
This work introduces the particle-intensity channel (PIC) as a model for molecular communication systems and characterizes the properties of the optimal input distribution and the capacity limits for this system. In the PIC, the transmitter…
In many developmental systems, cells differentiate into a tissue by reading out morphogen concentration fields, a process fundamentally limited by noise. How much can the precision of this process be improved by nonlocal information, e.g.,…
Nanopore sequencing is an emerging new technology for sequencing DNA, which can read long fragments of DNA (~50,000 bases) in contrast to most current short-read sequencing technologies which can only read hundreds of bases. While nanopore…
We perform an analytical investigation of the cell interface dynamics in the framework of a minimal phase field model of cell motility suggested in [1], which consists of two coupled evolution equations for the order parameter and a…
Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how…
Many developmental processes in biology utilize Notch-Delta signaling to construct an ordered pattern of cellular differentiation. This signaling modality is based on nearest-neighbor contact, as opposed to the more familiar mechanism…
The onset of neural induction in the anterior ectoderm of ascidian embryos is regulated at the extracellular level by FGF signaling molecules, which control the acquisition of neural fate through the activation of the ERK pathway. Among the…
Using waves to explore our environment is a widely used paradigm, ranging from seismology to radar technology, and from bio-medical imaging to precision measurements. In all of these fields, the central aim is to gather as much information…
Biological cells are able to accurately sense chemicals with receptors at their surfaces, allowing cells to move towards sources of attractant and away from sources of repellent. The accuracy of sensing chemical concentration is ultimately…