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Biological information processing manifests a huge variety in its complexity and capability among different organisms, which presumably stems from the evolutionary optimization under limited computational resources. Starting from the…
As biochemical systems may frequently suffer from limited energy resources so that internal molecular fluctuation has to be utilized to induce random rhythm, it is still a great theoretical challenge to understand the elementary principles…
Energy efficient information transmission may be relevant to biological sensory signal processing as well as to low power electronic devices. We explore its consequences in two different regimes. In an ``immediate'' regime, we argue that…
The generation and conduction of action potentials represents a fundamental means of communication in the nervous system, and is a metabolically expensive process. In this paper, we investigate the energy efficiency of neural systems in a…
Despite being optimized, the information processing of biological organisms exhibits significant variability in its complexity and capability. One potential source of this diversity is the limitation of resources required for information…
Life depends as much on the flow of information as on the flow of energy. Here we review the many efforts to make this intuition precise. Starting with the building blocks of information theory, we explore examples where it has been…
One of the primary computational requirements of a cellular system is the ability to transfer information between spatially separated components. To accomplish this, biology uses diverse physical channels including production or release of…
Recent experimental and theoretical studies show that energy efficiency, which measures the amount of information processed by a neuron with per unit of energy consumption, plays an important role in the evolution of neural systems. Here,…
The importance of low power consumption is widely acknowledged due to the increasing use of portable devices, which require minimizing the consumption of energy. The energy in a computational system depends heavily on the software being…
Signal transduction, or signal-processing capability, is a fundamental property of nature that manifests universally across systems of different scales -- from quantum behaviour to the biological. This includes the detection of…
The growth rate of organisms depends both on external conditions and on internal states, such as the expression levels of various genes. We show that to achieve a criterion mean growth rate over an ensemble of conditions, the internal…
In this Chapter, we ask questions (1) What is the right way to measure the quality of information processing in a biological system? and (2) What can real-life organisms do in order to improve their performance in information-processing…
Recent advances in nonequilibrium statistical physics have provided unprecedented insight into the thermodynamics of dynamic processes. The author recently used these advances to extend Landauer's semi-formal reasoning concerning the…
The connection between optimal biological function and energy use, measured for example by the rate of metabolite consumption, is a current topic of interest in the systems biology literature which has been explored in several different…
It is widely believed that the perceptual system of an organism is optimized for the properties of the environment to which it is exposed. A specific instance of this principle known as the Infomax principle holds that the purpose of early…
By considering the energy cost of messages carried by proteins as proportional to their information content we found experimental proof that proteins from all living organisms tend to have their estimated semantic content of information per…
Transport networks are typically optimized, either by evolutionary pressures in biological systems or by human design in engineered structures. In the case of systems such as the animal vasculature, the transport of fluids is hindered by…
The mammalian brain is a metabolically expensive device, and evolutionary pressures have presumably driven it to make productive use of its resources. For sensory areas, this concept has been expressed more formally as an optimality…
Microscopic biological systems operate far from equilibrium, are subject to strong fluctuations, and are composed of many coupled components with interactions varying in nature and strength. Researchers are actively investigating the…
We study the average asymptotic growth rate of cells in randomly fluctuating environments, with multiple viable phenotypes per environment. We show that any information processing strategy has an asymptotic growth rate, which is the sum of:…