The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Blood Pressure Measurement: Molecular Communication in Biological Systems

TL;DR

This paper explores how blood pressure measurement exemplifies molecular communication in biological systems, proposing strategies inspired by natural systems to improve reliability and guide synthetic system design.

Contribution

It introduces three novel strategies for molecular communication, providing a classification framework and analyzing the capacity of a molecular link using Michaelis-Menten kinetics.

Findings

Strategies enable reliable molecular communication despite encoding challenges

Capacity analysis shows potential for non-intrusive communication methods

Framework guides design of synthetic biological communication systems

Abstract

Arterial blood pressure is a key vital sign for the health of the human body. As such, accurate and reproducible measurement techniques are necessary for successful diagnosis. Blood pressure measurement is an example of molecular communication in regulated biological systems. In general, communication in regulated biological systems is difficult because the act of encoding information about the state of the system can corrupt the message itself. In this paper, we propose three strategies to cope with this problem to facilitate reliable molecular communication links: communicate from the outskirts; build it in; and leave a small footprint. Our strategies---inspired by communication in natural biological systems---provide a classification to guide the design of molecular communication mechanisms in synthetic biological systems. We illustrate our classification using examples of the first two strategies in natural systems. We then consider a molecular link within a model based on the Michaelis-Menten kinetics. In particular, we compute the capacity of the link, which reveals the potential of communicating using our leave a small footprint strategy. This provides a way of identifying whether the molecular link can be improved without affecting the function, and a guide to the design of synthetic biological systems.