Abstract
Intercellular communication and its coordination allow cells to exhibit multistability as a form of adaptation. This conveys information processing from intracellular signaling networks enabling self-organization between other cells, typically involving mechanisms associated with cognitive systems. How information is integrated in a functional manner and its relationship with the different cell fates is still unclear. In parallel, drawn originally from studies on neuroscience, integrated information proposes an approach to quantify the balance between integration and differentiation in the causal dynamics among the elements in any interacting system. In this work, such an approach is considered to study the dynamical complexity in a genetic network of repressilators coupled by quorum sensing. Several attractors under different conditions are identified and related to proposed measures of integrated information to have an insight into the collective interaction and functional differentiation in cells. This research particularly accounts for the open question about the coding and information transmission in genetic systems.
Highlights
Information-processing in living systems spans different degrees of biological complexity.From neural networks, where we find integration of information from different segregated modules in the nervous system, to the gene regulation and cell differentiation, whose structural mechanisms allow integration of signal transduction processes for survival and adaptation
We explore the spatio-temporal interactions of genetic oscillators that communicate through quorum sensing
We show the plots of the measures of integrated information described above from which we contrast their differences for the specific genetic repressilator architectures
Summary
Information-processing in living systems spans different degrees of biological complexity. Some authors describe cognition as a set of mechanisms such as information acquisition and coding from the environment [9] that allow biological entities act in a specific way to satisfy a viability constraint [10], or as a complex of sensory and information-processing derived by the structural and causal bidirectional interaction between organism and environment [1,5,11] These interactions allow coding and processing of information to satisfy the requirements in living systems and provide the ability of acquiring, retaining, and using information from the environment to sensing, learning, and decision-making for adaptation of behavior and physiology for survival and growth. Our results give insights to understanding their applicability and to which extent each one reflects some degree of dynamical complexity
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
