Related papers: Single cells can resolve graded stimuli
The evolution of symbolic communication is a longstanding open research question in biology. While some theories suggest that it originated from sub-symbolic communication (i.e., iconic or indexical), little experimental evidence exists on…
Quantification of information content and its temporal variation in intracellular calcium spike trains in neurons helps one understand functions such as memory, learning, and cognition. Such quantification could also reveal pathological…
Living organisms must respond to environmental changes. Generally, accurate and rapid responses are provided by simple, unidirectional networks that connect inputs with outputs. Besides accuracy and speed, biological responses should also…
Biological information processing is generally assumed to be classical. Measured cellular energy budgets of both prokaryotes and eukaryotes, however, fall orders of magnitude short of the power required to maintain classical states of…
Cell signaling, gene expression, and metabolism are affected by cell-cell heterogeneity and random changes in the environment. The effects of such fluctuations on cell signaling and gene expression have recently been studied intensively…
A hallmark of aging is loss of information in gene regulatory networks. These networks are tightly connected, raising the question of whether information could be restored by perturbing single genes. We develop a simple theoretical…
Many cellular processes involve information processing and decision making. We can probe these processes at increasing molecular detail. The analysis of heterogeneous data remains a challenge that requires new ways of thinking about cells…
We recently reported the existence of fluctuations in neural signals that may permit neurons to code multiple simultaneous stimuli sequentially across time. This required deploying a novel statistical approach to permit investigation of…
In the past decades, advances in microscopy have made it possible to study the dynamics of individual biomolecules in vitro and resolve intramolecular kinetics that would otherwise be hidden in ensemble averages. More recently,…
Biological molecules, like all active matter, use free energy to generate force and motion which drive them out of thermal equilibrium, and undergo inherent dynamic interconversion between metastable free energy states separated by levels…
The diversity of expressed genes plays a critical role in cellular specialization, adaptation to environmental changes, and overall cell functionality. This diversity varies dramatically across cell types and is orchestrated by intricate,…
Single-cell technologies offer insights into molecular feature distributions, but comparing them poses challenges. We propose a kernel-testing framework for non-linear cell-wise distribution comparison, analyzing gene expression and…
A detailed understanding of the interface between living cells and substrate materials is of rising importance in many fields of medicine, biology and biotechnology. Cells at interfaces often form epithelia. The physical barrier that they…
Sensing and reciprocating cellular systems (SARs) are important for the operation of many biological systems. Production in interferon (IFN) SARs is achieved through activation of the Jak-Stat pathway, and downstream upregulation of IFN…
Cortical circuits exhibit high levels of response diversity, even across apparently uniform neuronal populations. While emerging data-driven approaches exploit this heterogeneity to infer effective models of cortical circuit computation…
Experimental evidence indicates that human brain cancer cells proliferate or migrate, yet do not display both phenotypes at the same time. Here, we present a novel computational model simulating this cellular decision-process leading up to…
Neuronal and glial cells release diverse proteoglycans and glycoproteins, which aggregate in the extracellular space and form the extracellular matrix (ECM) that may in turn regulate major cellular functions. Brain cells also release…
The manner in which groups of neurons represent events in the external world is fundamental to neuroscience. Here, we analyze the population code of the retina during naturalistic stimulation and show that the information conveyed by…
The space of possible behaviors complex biological systems may exhibit is unimaginably vast, and these systems often appear to be stochastic, whether due to variable noisy environmental inputs or intrinsically generated chaos. The brain is…
Cell signaling networks are complex and often incompletely characterized, making it difficult to obtain a comprehensive picture of the mechanisms they encode. Mathematical modeling of these networks provides important clues, but the models…