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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 20: Statistical Physics of Biological Systems I (joint session DY/BP)

DY 20.4: Talk

Tuesday, March 19, 2024, 10:30–10:45, BH-N 334

Information theory of chemotactic agents using both spatial and temporal comparison — Julian Rode¹, Maja Novak², and •Benjamin M. Friedrich¹ — ¹Physics of Life, TU Dresden, Germany — ²University of Zagreb, Croatia

Biological system process information despite noise-corrupted input, often operating at physical limits. A prime example is chemotaxis, i.e., active navigation of biological cells in spatial fields of chemical cues. Intriguingly, cells of different size use two different chemotaxis strategies, comparing concentrations in either space or time. Only heuristic arguments exist to explain this evolutionary choice. We present an information theory of an ideal agent that combines both strategies to quantify ‘chemotaxis in bits’ [1]. This enables us to predict when each strategy provides more information as function of a new powerlaw that combines agent size, motility noise and sensing noise. We demonstrate our theory with a bio-inspired search robot. [1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.14.562229v1

Keywords: navigation; chemotaxis; information decomposition; robot experiment