Asymptotic Cellular Growth Rate as the Effective Information Utilization Rate

TL;DR

This paper models cellular growth in fluctuating environments, revealing how information processing and utilization influence long-term growth rates, and identifies optimal switching strategies in non-stationary conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a framework linking information utilization rate to cellular growth, accounting for environmental variability and non-stationary dynamics, which is a novel approach.

Findings

Growth rate depends on environmental worst-case and information utilization.

Optimal phenotypic switching partitions information dissipation equally.

Framework quantifies the role of sensory information in growth optimization.

Abstract

We study the average asymptotic growth rate of cells in randomly fluctuating environments, with multiple viable phenotypes per environment. We show that any information processing strategy has an asymptotic growth rate, which is the sum of: (i) the maximal growth rate at the worst possible distribution of environments, (ii) relative information between the actual distribution of environments to the worst one, and (iii) information utilization rate, which is the information rate of the sensory devices minus the "information dissipation rate", the amount of information not utilized by the cell for growth. In non-stationary environments, we find that the optimal phenotypic switching times equally partition the information dissipation rate between consecutive switching intervals.