April Lecture: Avishek Das
Gautham Ganesh
Tune in to Avishek Das' talk to learn why even bacteria need good feedback to find their way!
Utility of information for stochastic navigators
April 23, 17:00 (Paris - CEST)
Zoom link: https://umontpellier-fr.zoom.us/j/98795045938
Abstract:
Microscale navigators such as chemotactic cells sense the gradient of signals to move towards a target using actuators like flagellar motors. Both sensory and actuation systems are perturbed by thermal noise, resulting in finite rates of information transmission. The ability to quantify this directional flow of information is vital to understand and design chemotactic navigators. However, the information in the dynamical trajectories of signals could not be directly quantified until now because of the high dimensionality of trajectory space. We have developed a computational algorithm called Transfer Entropy-Path Weight Sampling (TE-PWS) (link), which makes it possible, for the first time, to exactly compute the directional information transmission in any general stochastic model, including those with multiple hidden variables, nonlinearity, transient conditions, and feedback. By applying TE-PWS and novel theoretical methods to the chemotaxis of the Escherichia coli bacteria, we show that information feedback from the navigator to the environment through its actuator is crucial; in fact, navigation is possible only if future signals are affected by the current response. A prediction of the theory is an optimal amount of information feedback for the highest navigation efficiency in a system-independent way. Our study quantifies the biological utility of information, makes experimentally testable predictions, and can direct the optimal design of synthetic navigators.
Further information:
Avishek Das is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (AMOLF) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where he is exploring behavioural similarities between motile bacteria and synthetic microrobots in gradients of chemical signals using the framework of information theory. From June this year, he will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at Durham University, UK, where his group will work towards understanding and designing information processing in soft matter through the combination of chemical and mechanical motifs. For more information, see his webpage.
Please share and spread the word, the more the merrier!
If you have any questions or if you'd like to present your own research, post in the group, or contact us at
lzeitler [at] turing [dot] ac [dot] uk
gautham [dot] ganesh [at] cbs [dot] cnrs [dot] fr
Gautham Ganesh
Utility of information for stochastic navigators
April 23, 17:00 (Paris - CEST)
Zoom link: https://umontpellier-fr.zoom.us/j/98795045938
Gautham Ganesh
Utility of information for stochastic navigators
April 23, 17:00 (Paris - CEST)
Zoom link: https://umontpellier-fr.zoom.us/j/98795045938