Nguyen H, Dayan P, Goodhill G J
Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia.
Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, UCL, London, UK.
J Theor Biol. 2014 Nov 7;360:95-101. doi: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2014.06.022. Epub 2014 Jul 2.
Chemotaxis, or gradient following, is important in many biological systems, but suffers from noise. How receptors are positioned on the cell or sensing device influences the quality of the inferences they can support about the gradient, suggesting that their configuration might be optimised. We show that for an elliptical sensing device, inhomogeneous receptor placement could be a potential approach for cells to eliminate bias in the posterior distribution of the gradient direction. We use information theory to calculate the mutual information between the gradient and the binding pattern, thus finding the optimal receptor arrangement for gradient sensing.
趋化作用，即梯度追踪，在许多生物系统中都很重要，但存在噪声问题。受体在细胞或传感设备上的定位方式会影响它们对梯度所能支持的推断质量，这表明其配置可能需要优化。我们表明，对于椭圆形传感设备，不均匀的受体放置可能是细胞消除梯度方向后验分布偏差的一种潜在方法。我们使用信息论来计算梯度与结合模式之间的互信息，从而找到用于梯度传感的最佳受体排列。
