ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Trading bits in the readout from a genetic network.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 0 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Positional information and information flows in dynamic tissues.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Unifying theories in high-dimensional biophysics: approaches, challenges and opportunities.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2026Article
- Minimax entropy: The statistical physics of optimal models.Physical review. E · 2025Article
- Characterizing the regulatory logic of transcriptional control at the DNA sequence level by ensembles of thermodynamic models.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2025Article
- Optimization and variability can coexist.ArXiv · 2025Article
- Dynamics of positional information in the vertebrate neural tube.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Information content and optimization of self-organized developmental systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Trade-offs between cost and information in cellular prediction.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Early radial positional information in the cochlea is optimized by a precise linear BMP gradient and enhanced by SOX2.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Information bottleneck theory of high-dimensional regression: relevancy, efficiency and optimality.Advances in neural information processing systems · 2022Article
- Deduction of signaling mechanisms from cellular responses to multiple cues.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2022Article
- How does an organism extract relevant information from transcription factor concentrations?Biochemical Society transactions · 2022Review
- Latent space of a small genetic network: Geometry of dynamics and information.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Universal antigen encoding of T cell activation from high-dimensional cytokine dynamics.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2022Article
- Patterning, From Conifers to Consciousness: Turing's Theory and Order From Fluctuations.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2022Review
- Optimizing information transmission in optogenetic Wnt signaling.Physical review researchArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
In the regulation of gene expression, information of relevance to the organism is represented by the concentrations of transcription factor molecules. To extract this information the cell must effectively "measure" these concentrations, but there are physical limits to the precision of these measurements. We use the gap gene network in the early fly embryo as an example of the tradeoff between the precision of concentration measurements and the transmission of relevant information. For thresholded measurements we find that lower thresholds are more important, and fine tuning is not required for near-optimal information transmission. We then consider general sensors, constrained only by a limit on their information capacity, and find that thresholded sensors can approach true information theoretic optima. The information theoretic approach allows us to identify the optimal sensor for the entire gap gene network and to argue that the physical limitations of sensing necessitate the observed multiplicity of enhancer elements, with sensitivities to combinations rather than single transcription factors.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.