Tkacik Group

Information Processing in Biological Systems

How do networks built out of biological components – neurons, signaling molecules, genes, or even cooperating organisms – process information? In contrast to engineered systems, biological networks operate under strong constraints due to noise, limited energy, or specificity, yet nevertheless perform their functions reliably. The group uses biophysics and information theory to understand the principles and mechanisms behind this remarkable phenomenon.

How can cells in a multicellular organism reproducibly decide what tissue they are going to become? How do neurons in the retina cooperate to best encode visual information into neural spikes? How does the physics at the microscopic scale, which dictates how individual regulatory molecules interact with each other, constrain the kinds of regulatory networks that are observed in real organisms today, and how can such networks evolve? These are some of the questions addressed by the Tkačik group. About half of their time is dedicated to data-driven projects performed in close collaboration with experimentalists, and half on purely theoretical projects. Their goal is to develop theoretical ideas about biological network function and connect them to high-precision data.