Positional information, in bits

DOI10.1073/PNAS.1315642110MaRDI QIDQ5171030zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Julien O. Dubuis, Gašper Tkačik, Eric F. Wieschaus, Thomas Gregor, William Bialek

Publication date 25 July 2014

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1201.0198, https://europepmc.org/articles/pmc3799327

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Genetics and epigenetics (92D10)

Abstract: Cells in a developing embryo have no direct way of "measuring" their physical position. Through a variety of processes, however, the expression levels of multiple genes come to be correlated with position, and these expression levels thus form a code for "positional information." We show how to measure this information, in bits, using the gap genes in the Drosophila embryo as an example. Individual genes carry nearly two bits of information, twice as much as expected if the expression patterns consisted only of on/off domains separated by sharp boundaries. Taken together, four gap genes carry enough information to define a cell's location with an error bar of ~1% along the anterior-posterior axis of the embryo. This precision is nearly enough for each cell to have a unique identity, which is the maximum information the system can use, and is nearly constant along the length of the embryo. We argue that this constancy is a signature of optimality in the transmission of information from primary morphogen inputs to the output of the gap gene network.

Recommendations

• Suppression of positional errors in biological development
• Morphogenesis by coupled regulatory networks: reliable control of positional information and proportion regulation
• Robust development as a consequence of generated positional information
• Information measure of location precision
• Modeling segmental patterning in \textit{Drosophila}: maternal and gap genes

Cited in

(7)

• Information measure of location precision
• Coordinate invariance as a fundamental constraint on the form of stimulus-specific information measures
• Trade-offs in delayed information transmission in biochemical networks
• Detecting concentration changes with cooperative receptors
• Fundamental limits to cellular sensing
• New challenges in spatial ecology
• Information storage and transfer in autoregulated cascades

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