How accurately must cells measure the concentrations of signaling molecules?

Marianne Bauer; William Bialek

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arXiv · 2212.12471

How accurately must cells measure the concentrations of signaling molecules?

Marianne Bauer·William Bialek

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Abstract

Information of relevance to the organism often is represented by the concentrations of particular molecules inside a cell. As outside observers we can now measure these concentrations precisely, but the cell's own mechanisms must be noisier. We show that, in certain limits, there is a universal tradeoff between the information capacity of these concentration measurements and the amount of relevant information that is captured, a version of the information bottleneck problem. This universal tradeoff is confirmed, quantitatively, in an analysis of the positional information encoded by the gap genes in the developing fly embryo.

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Marianne Bauer, William Bialek. 2022-12-23. How accurately must cells measure the concentrations of signaling molecules?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.12471

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