Related papers: Trade-offs between cost and information in cellula…
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…
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…
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…
Organisms must acquire and use environmental information to guide their behaviors. However, it is unclear whether and how information quantitatively limits behavioral performance. Here, we relate information to behavioral performance in…
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,…
One major challenge for living cells is the measurement and prediction of signals corrupted by noise. In general, cells need to make decisions based on their compressed representation of noisy, time-varying signals. Strategies for signal…
Understanding how the complex connectivity structure of the brain shapes its information-processing capabilities is a long-standing question. By focusing on a paradigmatic architecture, we study how the neural activity of excitatory and…
Intercellular signaling has an important role in organism development, but not all communication occurs using the same mechanism. Here, we analyze the energy efficiency of intercellular signaling by two canonical mechanisms: diffusion of…
Working memory requires the brain to maintain information from the recent past to guide ongoing behavior. Neurons can contribute to this capacity by slowly integrating their inputs over time, creating persistent activity that outlasts the…
Reduction of costs in biological signalling seems an evolutionary advantage, but recent experiments have shown signalling codes shifted to signals of high cost with a underutilisation of low cost signals. Here I show that errors in the…
Precise channel state knowledge is crucial in future wireless communication systems, which drives the need for accurate channel prediction without additional pilot overhead. While machine-learning (ML) methods for channel prediction show…
Cells often perform computations in response to environmental cues. A simple example is the classic problem, first considered by Berg and Purcell, of determining the concentration of a chemical ligand in the surrounding media. On general…
Lateral predictive coding is a recurrent neural network which creates energy-efficient internal representations by exploiting statistical regularity in sensory inputs. Here we investigate the trade-off between information robustness and…
Given the stochastic nature of gene expression, genetically identical cells exposed to the same environmental inputs will produce different outputs. This heterogeneity has been hypothesized to have consequences for how cells are able to…
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.…
Cells use biochemical networks to translate environmental information into intracellular responses. These responses can be highly dynamic, but how the information is encoded in these dynamics remains poorly understood. Here we investigate…
Almost all neural computations involve making predictions. Whether an organism is trying to catch prey, avoid predators, or simply move through a complex environment, the data it collects through its senses can guide its actions only to the…
Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how…
The living cell uses a variety of molecular receptors to read and process chemical signals that vary in space and time. We model the dynamics of such molecular level measurements as Markov processes in steady state, with a coupling between…
Biochemical networks can respond to temporal characteristics of time-varying signals. To understand how reliably biochemical networks can transmit information we must consider how an input signal as a function of time--the input…