Related papers: Biological Information
Information theory is gaining popularity as a tool to characterize performance of biological systems. However, information is commonly quantified without reference to whether or how a system could extract and use it; as a result,…
Alongside molecular insights into genes and proteins, biological imaging holds great promise for deepening scientific understanding of complex cellular systems and advancing predictive, personalized therapies for human health. To realize…
Cellular biology exists embedded in a world dominated by random dynamics and chance. Many vital molecules and pieces of cellular machinery diffuse within cells, moving along random trajectories as they collide with the other biomolecular…
The Shannon-Weaver model of linear information transmission is extended with two loops potentially generating redundancies: (i) meaning is provided locally to the information from the perspective of hindsight, and (ii) meanings can be…
Complex systems, from the human brain to the global economy, are made of multiple elements that interact in such ways that the behaviour of the `whole' often seems to be more than what is readily explainable in terms of the `sum of the…
Information theory provides powerful tools for understanding communication systems. This analysis can be applied to intercellular signal transduction, which is a means of chemical communication among cells and microbes. We discuss how to…
In order to survive, reproduce and (in multicellular organisms) differentiate, cells must control the concentrations of the myriad different proteins that are encoded in the genome. The precision of this control is limited by the inevitable…
We discuss foundational issues of quantum information biology (QIB) -- one of the most successful applications of the quantum formalism outside of physics. QIB provides a multi-scale model of information processing in bio-systems: from…
Many biological phenomena or social events critically depend on how information evolves in complex networks. However, a general theory to characterize information evolution is yet absent. Consequently, numerous unknowns remain about the…
Plants exchange information through multiple modalities, including chemical, electrical, mycorrhizal, and acoustic signaling, which collectively support survival, defense, and adaptation. While these processes are well documented in…
Molecular communication, as implied by its name, uses molecules as information carriers for communication between objects. It has an advantage over traditional electromagnetic-wave-based communication in that molecule-based systems could be…
From subcellular structures to entire organisms, many natural systems generate complex organisation through self-organisation: local interactions that collectively give rise to global structure without any blueprint of the outcome. Yet a…
Engineered systems typically separate mechanical function from information processing, whereas biological systems can exploit physical structure as a medium for information processing and computation. Motivated by this contrast, recent work…
Molecular biology is a nanotechnology that works--it has worked for billions of years and in an amazing variety of circumstances. At its core is a system for acquiring, processing and communicating information that is universal, from…
Understanding how genes interact and relate to each other is a fundamental question in biology. However, current practices for describing these relationships, such as drawing diagrams or graphs in a somewhat arbitrary manner, limit our…
In many biological networks the responses of individual elements are ambiguous. We consider a scenario in which many sensors respond to a shared signal, each with limited information capacity, and ask that the outputs together convey as…
Biochemistry, ecology, and neuroscience are examples of prominent fields aiming at describing interacting systems that exhibit non-trivial couplings to complex, ever-changing environments. We have recently shown that linear interactions and…
In modern deep neural networks, the learning dynamics of the individual neurons is often obscure, as the networks are trained via global optimization. Conversely, biological systems build on self-organized, local learning, achieving…
Many of life's most fascinating phenomena emerge from interactions among many elements--many amino acids determine the structure of a single protein, many genes determine the fate of a cell, many neurons are involved in shaping our thoughts…
We survey the prospects for an Information Dynamics which can serve as the basis for a fundamental theory of information, incorporating qualitative and structural as well as quantitative aspects. We motivate our discussion with some basic…