{"month":"06","abstract":[{"lang":"eng","text":"A key feature of many developmental systems is their ability to self-organize spatial patterns of functionally distinct cell fates. To ensure proper biological function, such patterns must be established reproducibly, by controlling and even harnessing intrinsic and extrinsic fluctuations. While the relevant molecular processes are increasingly well understood, we lack a principled framework to quantify the performance of such stochastic self-organizing systems. To that end, we introduce an information-theoretic measure for self-organized fate specification during embryonic development. We show that the proposed measure assesses the total information content of fate patterns and decomposes it into interpretable contributions corresponding to the positional and correlational information. By optimizing the proposed measure, our framework provides a normative theory for developmental circuits, which we demonstrate on lateral inhibition, cell type proportioning, and reaction–diffusion models of self-organization. This paves a way toward a classification of developmental systems based on a common information-theoretic language, thereby organizing the zoo of implicated chemical and mechanical signaling processes."}],"isi":1,"file":[{"access_level":"open_access","checksum":"59797a75db7beb3721ed7a4d14c241f9","file_size":12329234,"date_updated":"2024-06-10T10:27:37Z","file_name":"2024_PNAS_Brueckner.pdf","relation":"main_file","file_id":"17130","success":1,"date_created":"2024-06-10T10:27:37Z","creator":"dernst","content_type":"application/pdf"}],"language":[{"iso":"eng"}],"APC_amount":"2570,79 EUR","_id":"17123","article_number":"e2322326121","status":"public","publication_identifier":{"eissn":["1091-6490"],"issn":["0027-8424"]},"publisher":"National Academy of Sciences","oa_version":"Published Version","volume":121,"department":[{"_id":"EdHa"},{"_id":"GaTk"}],"doi":"10.1073/pnas.2322326121","article_type":"original","date_updated":"2025-09-08T07:51:01Z","tmp":{"name":"Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)","image":"/images/cc_by_nc_nd.png","short":"CC BY-NC-ND (4.0)","legal_code_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode"},"intvolume":" 121","date_published":"2024-06-04T00:00:00Z","ddc":["570"],"OA_place":"publisher","has_accepted_license":"1","citation":{"short":"D. Brückner, G. Tkačik, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 121 (2024).","chicago":"Brückner, David, and Gašper Tkačik. “Information Content and Optimization of Self-Organized Developmental Systems.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. National Academy of Sciences, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2322326121.","mla":"Brückner, David, and Gašper Tkačik. “Information Content and Optimization of Self-Organized Developmental Systems.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 121, no. 23, e2322326121, National Academy of Sciences, 2024, doi:10.1073/pnas.2322326121.","ama":"Brückner D, Tkačik G. Information content and optimization of self-organized developmental systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2024;121(23). doi:10.1073/pnas.2322326121","ista":"Brückner D, Tkačik G. 2024. Information content and optimization of self-organized developmental systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 121(23), e2322326121.","ieee":"D. Brückner and G. Tkačik, “Information content and optimization of self-organized developmental systems,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 121, no. 23. National Academy of Sciences, 2024.","apa":"Brückner, D., & Tkačik, G. (2024). Information content and optimization of self-organized developmental systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2322326121"},"quality_controlled":"1","scopus_import":"1","corr_author":"1","author":[{"last_name":"Brückner","first_name":"David","id":"e1e86031-6537-11eb-953a-f7ab92be508d","full_name":"Brückner, David","orcid":"0000-0001-7205-2975"},{"orcid":"0000-0002-6699-1455","full_name":"Tkačik, Gašper","id":"3D494DCA-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87","last_name":"Tkačik","first_name":"Gašper"}],"related_material":{"link":[{"url":"https://github.com/dbrueckner/SelforgInformation","relation":"software"},{"description":"News on the ISTA website","url":"https://ista.ac.at/en/news/the-embryo-assembles-itself/","relation":"press_release"}]},"publication_status":"published","OA_type":"hybrid","user_id":"317138e5-6ab7-11ef-aa6d-ffef3953e345","date_created":"2024-06-09T22:01:02Z","year":"2024","issue":"23","external_id":{"pmid":["38819997"],"isi":["001244835000006"]},"file_date_updated":"2024-06-10T10:27:37Z","day":"04","acknowledgement":"We thank Wiktor Młynarski, Juraj Majek, Michal Hledík, Fridtjof Brauns, Nikolas Claussen, Benjamin Zoller, Erwin Frey, Thomas Gregor, and Edouard Hannezo for inspiring discussions. D.B.B. was supported by the NOMIS foundation as a NOMIS Fellow and by an European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) Postdoctoral Fellowship (ALTF 343-2022). This research was performed in part at the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by NSF Grant No. PHY-1607611, and Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) Santa Barbara, supported by NSF Grant No. PHY-1748958 and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Grant No. 2919.02.","project":[{"grant_number":"ALTF 343-2022","name":"A mechano-chemical theory for stem cell fate decisions in organoid development","_id":"34e2a5b5-11ca-11ed-8bc3-b2265616ef0b"}],"pmid":1,"title":"Information content and optimization of self-organized developmental systems","article_processing_charge":"Yes (in subscription journal)","publication":"Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America","type":"journal_article","oa":1}