Nonlocal decoding of positional and correlational information during development Zhang, Chen Y Mateu Hoyos, Pablo Brückner, David ; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7205-2975 Tkačik, Gašper ; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6699-1455 ddc:530 In many developmental systems, cells differentiate into a tissue by reading out morphogen concentration fields, a process fundamentally limited by noise. How much can the precision of this process be improved by nonlocal information, e.g., via cell-cell communication? Using a Bayes-optimal framework, we show that positional inference depends crucially on morphogen spatial correlations and on the "structural prior" that encodes the geometry of the cellular lattice performing the readout, thereby determining what a cell can reliably assume about the position of its neighbors when interpreting nonlocal morphogen signals. We derive upper bounds on positional information gain due to nonlocal readout and identify signal processing algorithms that approximate optimal positional inference, as well as simple chemical reaction schemes which implement such algorithms. Our theory suggests that correlational information can be exploited to significantly enhance developmental precision. American Physical Society 2026 info:eu-repo/semantics/article doc-type:article text http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_2df8fbb1 https://research-explorer.ista.ac.at/record/22326 https://research-explorer.ista.ac.at/download/22326/22352 Zhang CY, Mateu Hoyos P, Brückner D, Tkačik G. Nonlocal decoding of positional and correlational information during development. <i>Physical Review Letters</i>. 2026;137. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1103/mbjk-v4ym">10.1103/mbjk-v4ym</a> eng info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1103/mbjk-v4ym info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/issn/0031-9007 info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/e-issn/ 1079-7114 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess