Evidence map›Paper›PMID 38819997›Full record

ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024

Information content and optimization of self-organized developmental systems.

David B Brückner, Gašper Tkačik

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
7citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

7 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Fundamental limits incorporating logical reasoning into Shannon's information theory.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026
    Article
  2. Position-dependent feedback drives scaling and robustness of morphogen gradients.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026
    Article
  3. Positional information and information flows in dynamic tissues.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026
    Article
  4. Review
  5. Review
  6. Article
  7. Dynamical systems of fate and form in development.Seminars in cell & developmental biology · 2025
    Review
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

2 authors.

David B BrücknerInstitute of Science and Technology Austria, AT-3400 Klosterneuburg, Austria.ORCID 0000-0001-7205-2975
Gašper TkačikInstitute of Science and Technology Austria, AT-3400 Klosterneuburg, Austria.

Funding

European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) ALTF 343-2022
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

A key feature of many developmental systems is their ability to self-organize spatial patterns of functionally distinct cell fates. To ensure proper biological function, such patterns must be established reproducibly, by controlling and even harnessing intrinsic and extrinsic fluctuations. While the relevant molecular processes are increasingly well understood, we lack a principled framework to quantify the performance of such stochastic self-organizing systems. To that end, we introduce an information-theoretic measure for self-organized fate specification during embryonic development. We show that the proposed measure assesses the total information content of fate patterns and decomposes it into interpretable contributions corresponding to the positional and correlational information. By optimizing the proposed measure, our framework provides a normative theory for developmental circuits, which we demonstrate on lateral inhibition, cell type proportioning, and reaction-diffusion models of self-organization. This paves a way toward a classification of developmental systems based on a common information-theoretic language, thereby organizing the zoo of implicated chemical and mechanical signaling processes.

Indexed as

Models, BiologicalAnimalsEmbryonic Developmentdevelopmentinformation theoryself-organizationsignaling networks

Identifiers

PMID38819997
PMCPMC11161761

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY-NC-ND
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

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.