Related papers: Optimizing information flow in small genetic netwo…
Sensory neurons give highly variable responses to stimulation, which can limit the amount of stimulus information available to downstream circuits. Much work has investigated the factors that affect the amount of information encoded in…
Cells are often considered input-output devices that maximize the transmission of information by converting extracellular stimuli (input) via signaling pathways (communication channel) to cell behavior (output). However, in biological…
During organismal development, biochemical reaction networks sense and respond to mechanical forces to coordinate embryonic patterning with embryo morphogenesis. Factors such as cortical tension, cell density, and matrix mechanical…
Intracellular transmission of information via chemical and transcriptional networks is thwarted by a physical limitation: the finite copy number of the constituent chemical species introduces unavoidable intrinsic noise. Here we provide a…
Spatial self-organization emerges in distributed systems exhibiting local interactions when nonlinearities and the appropriate propagation of signals are at work. These kinds of phenomena can be modeled with different frameworks, typically…
Timing is essential for many cellular processes, from cellular responses to external stimuli to the cell cycle and circadian clocks. Many of these processes are based on gene expression. For example, an activated gene may be required to…
The precision of concentration sensing is improved when cells communicate. Here we derive the physical limits to concentration sensing for cells that communicate over short distances by directly exchanging small molecules (juxtacrine…
Cells continuously sense their surroundings to detect modifications and generate responses. Very often changes in extracellular concentrations initiate signaling cascades that eventually result in changes in gene expression. Increasing…
How can a microorganism adapt to a variety of environmental conditions despite there exists a limited number of signal transduction machineries? We show that for any growing cells whose gene expression is under stochastic fluctuations,…
Coordinated responses to environmental stimuli are critical for multicellular organisms. To overcome the obstacles of cell-to-cell heterogeneity and noisy signaling dynamics within individual cells, cells must effectively exchange…
Exploiting the information provided by the molecular noise of a biological process has proven to be valuable in extracting knowledge about the underlying kinetic parameters and sources of variability from single cell measurements. However,…
Communication of signals among nodes in a complex network poses fundamental problems of efficiency and cost. Routing of messages along shortest paths requires global information about the topology, while spreading by diffusion, which…
Through the last years, different strategies to enhance synchronization in complex networks have been proposed. In this Letter, we show that the synchronization in a small-world network of attractively coupled non-identical neurons is…
Biological cells encode information about their environment through biochemical signaling networks that control their internal state and response. This information is often encoded in the dynamical patterns of the signaling molecules,…
The regulation of cellular function is often controlled at the level of gene transcription. Such genetic regulation usually consists of interacting networks, whereby gene products from a single network can act to control their own…
Many biological, physical, and social interactions have a particular dependence on where they take place. In living cells, protein movement between the nucleus and cytoplasm affects cellular response (i.e., proteins must be present in the…
Spatial patterning and synchronization are pervasive features of plankton communities, yet the mechanisms that allow such patterns to persist coherently under environmental noise remain unresolved. In vertically structured aquatic…
In a developing embryo, information about the position of cells is encoded in the concentrations of "morphogen" molecules. In the fruit fly, the local concentrations of just a handful of proteins encoded by the gap genes are sufficient to…
Recent progress in experimental techniques has enabled us to quantitatively study stochastic and flexible behavior of biological systems. For example, gene regulatory networks perform stochastic information processing and their…
Units of complex systems -- such as neurons in the brain or individuals in societies -- must communicate efficiently to function properly: e.g., allowing electrochemical signals to travel quickly among functionally connected neuronal areas…