Physics (Internal)

"Biophysical constraints on cellular computation"

This event is part of the Biophysics/Condensed Matter Seminar Series.

In this talk, I'll first give the barest bit of biology to motivate computation through signaling in living cells. I'll then formulate its biophysical underpinning with a probabilistic graphical model which is intimately related to the statistical mechanics of the underlying molecular interactions. A few results such as the upper bound on the computational capacity of synthetic signaling system as well as its designability will be discussed. I'll also demonstrate the close similarity of this formulation to the function counting theorem of perceptrons put forth by Thomas M. Cover in 1965\cite{cover1965geometrical}. Finally, I'll address the challenges and limits of this framework, especially how to place this bound on the currently available synthetic networks.