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Living cells use readout molecules to record the state of receptor proteins, similar to measurements or copies in typical computational devices. But is this analogy rigorous? Can cells be optimally efficient, and if not, why? We show that,…
Living cells use readout molecules to record the state of receptor proteins, similar to measurements or copies in typical computational devices. But is this analogy rigorous? Can cells be optimally efficient, and if not, why? We show that,…
Cells measure concentrations of external ligands by capturing ligand molecules with cell surface receptors. The numbers of molecules captured by different receptors co-vary because they depend on the same extrinsic ligand fluctuations.…
In this paper, diffusion-based molecular commu- nication with ligand receptor receivers is studied. Information messages are assumed to be encoded via variations of the con- centration of molecules. The randomness in the ligand reception…
Statistical properties of environments experienced by biological signaling systems in the real world change, which necessitate adaptive responses to achieve high fidelity information transmission. One form of such adaptive response is gain…
Living cells presumably employ optimized information transfer methods, enabling efficient communication even in noisy environments. As expected, the efficiency of chemical communications between cells depends on the properties of the…
In biological cells and novel diagnostic devices biochemical receptors need to be sensitive to extremely small concentration changes of signaling molecules. The accuracy of such molecular signaling is ultimately limited by the counting…
We combine stochastic thermodynamics, large deviation theory, and information theory to derive fundamental limits on the accuracy with which single cell receptors can estimate external concentrations. As expected, if estimation is performed…
Living cells deploy many resources to sense their environments, including receptors, downstream signaling molecules, time and fuel. However, it is not known which resources fundamentally limit the precision of sensing, like weak links in a…
This paper presents a continuous, information-theoretic extension of the Free Energy Principle through the concept of Markov blanket density, i.e., a scalar field that quantifies the degree of conditional independence between internal and…
How cells reliably infer information about their environment is a fundamentally important question. While sensing and signaling generally start with cell-surface receptors, the degree of accuracy with which a cell can measure external…
The reliable detection of environmental molecules in the presence of noise is an important cellular function, yet the underlying computational mechanisms are not well understood. We introduce a model of two interacting sensors which allows…
Biological sensory systems react to changes in their surroundings. They are characterized by fast response and slow adaptation to varying environmental cues. Insofar as sensory adaptive systems map environmental changes to changes of their…
Life is a nonequilibrium phenomenon: metabolism provides a continuous supply of energy that drives nearly all cellular processes. However, very little is known about how much energy different cellular processes use, i.e. their energetic…
Molecular machines transduce free energy between different forms throughout all living organisms. While truly machines in their own right, unlike their macroscopic counterparts molecular machines are characterized by stochastic…
In recent years experiments have demonstrated that living cells can measure low chemical concentrations with high precision, and much progress has been made in understanding what sets the fundamental limit to the precision of chemical…
Across diverse biological systems -- ranging from neural networks to intracellular signaling and genetic regulatory networks -- the information about changes in the environment is frequently encoded in the full temporal dynamics of the…
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…
Cells can be considered as systems that utilize changes in thermodynamic entropy as information. Therefore, they serve as useful models for investigating the relationships between entropy production and information transmission, i.e.,…
Living systems operate far from thermal equilibrium by converting the chemical potential of ATP into mechanical work to achieve growth, replication or locomotion. Given time series observations of intra-, inter- or multicellular processes,…