Institute of Science and Technology Austria, Am Campus 1, AT-3400 Klosterneuburg, Austria.
Joseph Henry Laboratories of Physics and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
Development. 2021 Feb 1;148(2):dev176065. doi: 10.1242/dev.176065.
Half a century after Lewis Wolpert's seminal conceptual advance on how cellular fates distribute in space, we provide a brief historical perspective on how the concept of positional information emerged and influenced the field of developmental biology and beyond. We focus on a modern interpretation of this concept in terms of information theory, largely centered on its application to cell specification in the early embryo. We argue that a true physical variable (position) is encoded in local concentrations of patterning molecules, that this mapping is stochastic, and that the processes by which positions and corresponding cell fates are determined based on these concentrations need to take such stochasticity into account. With this approach, we shift the focus from biological mechanisms, molecules, genes and pathways to quantitative systems-level questions: where does positional information reside, how it is transformed and accessed during development, and what fundamental limits it is subject to?
半个世纪前，刘易斯·沃尔珀特（Lewis Wolpert）在细胞命运如何在空间中分配方面取得了开创性的概念性进展，我们提供了一个简短的历史视角，介绍了位置信息的概念是如何出现并影响发育生物学及其他领域的。我们专注于从信息论的角度对这一概念进行现代诠释，主要集中在其在早期胚胎中对细胞特化的应用上。我们认为，一个真正的物理变量（位置）被编码在模式分子的局部浓度中，这种映射是随机的，并且基于这些浓度确定位置和相应细胞命运的过程需要考虑到这种随机性。通过这种方法，我们将重点从生物学机制、分子、基因和途径转移到定量的系统水平问题上：位置信息驻留在何处，它在发育过程中是如何转化和访问的，以及它受到哪些基本限制？
