Democritus University of Thrace, Xanthi.
IEEE/ACM Trans Comput Biol Bioinform. 2012;9(2):571-9. doi: 10.1109/TCBB.2011.104. Epub 2011 Jul 18.
Bacteria evolved cell to cell communication processes to gain information about their environment and regulate gene expression. Quorum sensing is such a process in which signaling molecules, called autoinducers, are produced, secreted and detected. In several cases bacteria use more than one autoinducers and integrate the information conveyed by them. It has not yet been explained adequately why bacteria evolved such signal integration circuits and what can learn about their environments using more than one autoinducers since all signaling pathways merge in one. Here quantum information theory, which includes classical information theory as a special case, is used to construct a quantum gate circuit that reproduces recent experimental results. Although the conditions in which biosystems exist do not allow for the appearance of quantum mechanical phenomena, the powerful computation tools of quantum information processing can be carefully used to cope with signal and information processing by these complex systems. A simulation algorithm based on this model has been developed and numerical experiments that analyze the dynamical operation of the quorum sensing circuit were performed for various cases of autoinducer variations, which revealed that these variations contain significant information about the environment in which bacteria exist.
细菌进化出细胞间通讯过程，以获取环境信息并调节基因表达。群体感应就是这样一个过程，其中会产生、分泌和检测称为自动诱导物的信号分子。在某些情况下，细菌会使用多种自动诱导物，并整合它们所传递的信息。细菌为什么进化出这样的信号整合电路，以及使用多种自动诱导物可以了解它们的环境，这还没有得到充分解释，因为所有的信号通路都融合在一个通路中。在这里，量子信息理论（包括经典信息理论作为特例）被用来构建一个量子门电路，该电路再现了最近的实验结果。尽管生物系统存在的条件不允许出现量子力学现象，但可以仔细使用量子信息处理的强大计算工具来应对这些复杂系统的信号和信息处理。已经开发了基于该模型的仿真算法，并针对自动诱导物变化的各种情况进行了分析群体感应电路动态操作的数值实验，结果表明这些变化包含了有关细菌生存环境的重要信息。
