Related papers: How accurately must cells measure the concentratio…
In genetic networks, information of relevance to the organism is represented by the concentrations of transcription factor molecules. In order to extract this information the cell must effectively "measure"' these concentrations, but there…
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…
When cells measure concentrations of chemical signals, they may average multiple measurements over time in order to reduce noise in their measurements. However, when cells are in a environment that changes over time, past measurements may…
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…
A ubiquitous way that cells share information is by exchanging molecules. Yet, the fundamental ways that this information exchange is influenced by intracellular dynamics remain unclear. Here we use information theory to investigate a…
Cells in a developing embryo have no direct way of "measuring" their physical position. Through a variety of processes, however, the expression levels of multiple genes come to be correlated with position, and these expression levels thus…
Changes in a cell's external or internal conditions are usually reflected in the concentrations of the relevant transcription factors. These proteins in turn modulate the expression levels of the genes under their control and sometimes need…
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.…
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…
Cellular signaling is essential in information processing and decision making. Therefore, a variety of experimental approaches have been developed to study signaling on bulk and single-cell level. Single-cell measurements of signaling…
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…
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…
The number of ribosomes in a cell is considered as limiting, and gene expression is thus largely determined by their cellular concentration. In this work we develop a toy model to study the trade-off between the ribosomal supply and the…
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…
Cellular decision making is based on regulatory circuits that associate signal thresholds to specific physiological actions. This transmission of information is subjected to molecular noise what can decrease its fidelity. Here, we show…
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.,…
How can we enable machines to make sense of the world, and become better at learning? To approach this goal, I believe viewing intelligence in terms of many integral aspects, and also a universal two-term tradeoff between task performance…
Central to the functioning of a living cell is its ability to control the readout or expression of information encoded in the genome. In many cases, a single transcription factor protein activates or represses the expression of many genes.…
A major obstacle in analyzing the evolution of information exchange and processing is our insufficient understanding of the underlying signaling and decision-making biological mechanisms. For instance, it is unclear why are humans unique in…