Tiling solutions for optimal biological sensing

TL;DR

This paper reviews how biological systems optimize sensing through discrete tiling structures, balancing resource limitations and stochastic signals in gene regulation and immune diversity.

Contribution

It reveals that optimal biological sensing systems employ similar tiling strategies, highlighting universal principles in biological information processing.

Findings

Optimal immune repertoires and gene networks exhibit tiling structures.

Tiling ensures nearly uniform coverage of response space.

Physical constraints shape the design of biological sensing systems.

Abstract

Biological systems, from cells to organisms, must respond to the ever changing environment in order to survive and function. This is not a simple task given the often random nature of the signals they receive, as well as the intrinsically stochastic, many body and often self-organized nature of the processes that control their sensing and response and limited resources. Despite a wide range of scales and functions that can be observed in the living world, some common principles that govern the behavior of biological systems emerge. Here I review two examples of very different biological problems: information transmission in gene regulatory networks and diversity of adaptive immune receptor repertoires that protect us from pathogens. I discuss the trade-offs that physical laws impose on these systems and show that the optimal designs of both immune repertoires and gene regulatory networks display similar discrete tiling structures. These solutions rely on locally non-overlapping placements of the responding elements (genes and receptors) that, overall, cover space nearly uniformly.