Related papers: Trade-offs between cost and information in cellula…
Living cells can enhance their fitness by anticipating environmental change. We study how accurately linear signaling networks in cells can predict future signals. We find that maximal predictive power results from a combination of…
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…
Information transmission in biological signaling circuits has often been described using the metaphor of a noise filter. Cellular systems need accurate, real-time data about their environmental conditions, but the biochemical reaction…
In many developmental systems, cells differentiate into a tissue by reading out morphogen concentration fields, a process fundamentally limited by noise. How much can the precision of this process be improved by nonlocal information, e.g.,…
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…
To successfully navigate chemical gradients, microorganisms need to predict how the ligand concentration changes in space. Due to their limited size, they do not take a spatial derivative over their body length but rather a temporal…
Guiding behavior requires the brain to make predictions about future sensory inputs. Here we show that efficient predictive computation starts at the earliest stages of the visual system. We estimate how much information groups of retinal…
Living cells often need to measure chemical concentrations that vary in time. To this end, they deploy many resources, e.g. receptors, downstream signaling molecules, time and energy. Here, we present a theory for the optimal design of a…
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,…
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…
Cells use temporal dynamical patterns to transmit information via signaling pathways. As optimality with respect to the environment plays a fundamental role in biological systems, organisms have evolved optimal ways to transmit information.…
Cells are constantly exposed to fluctuating environmental conditions. External signals are sensed, processed and integrated by cellular signal transduction networks, which translate input signals into specific cellular responses by means of…
To compensate for sensory processing delays, the visual system must make predictions to ensure timely and appropriate behaviors. Recent work has found predictive information about the stimulus in neural populations early in vision…
Environmental fluctuations can shape replicator dynamics, with important consequences for both prebiotic and modern ecosystems. However, it remains unclear how simple replicators can acquire and use information about fluctuating…
During development, highly ordered structures emerge as cells collectively coordinate with each other. While recent advances have clarified how individual cells process and respond to external signals, understanding collective cellular…
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…
Biological organisms are open, adaptve systems that can respond to changes in environment in specific ways. Adaptation and response can be posed as an optimization problem, with a tradeoff between the benefit obtained from a response and…
Any organism is embedded in an environment that changes over time. The timescale for and statistics of environmental change, the precision with which the organism can detect its environment, and the costs and benefits of particular protein…
We consider a mobile user accessing contents in a dynamic environment, where new contents are generated over time (by the user's contacts), and remain relevant to the user for random lifetimes. The user, equipped with a finite-capacity…
A cell routinely responds to one of many competing environmental cues. A fundamental question is whether the cell follows the cue prioritized by its internal signaling network or the cue that carries the most external information. We…