Information content and optimization of self-organized developmental systems.

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

SUBMITTER: Bruckner DB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11161761 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature