ABSTRACT
Quantitative Biology: From Molecular to Cellular Systems edited by Michael E. Wall © 2012 CRC Press / Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. ISBN: 978-1-4398-2722-2
4.1 Life Is Information Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
4.2 Quantifying Biological Information Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .74 4.2.1 What Is Needed? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 4.2.2 Introducing the Right Quantities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .76 4.2.3 When the Relevant Variable Is Unknown: The Value of
Information about the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 4.2.4 Time-Dependent Signals: Information and Prediction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
4.3 Improving Information-Processing Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .81 4.3.1 Strategies for Improving the Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .81 4.3.2 Three Kinds of Adaptation in Information Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 4.3.3 Mechanisms of Different Adaptations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
4.4 What’s Next? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
How can organisms deal with noise, whether extrinsic or generated by intrinsic stochastic fluctuations within molecular components of information processing devices?
