Tiling solutions for optimal biological sensing

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.Comment: 11 page

Entropy of foliations with leafwise Finsler structure

We extend the notion of the geometric entropy of foliation to foliated manifolds equipped with leafwise Finsler structure. We study the relation between the geometric entropy and the topological entropy of the holonomy pseudogroup. The case of foliated manifold with leafwise Randers structure. In this case the estimates for one dimensional foliation defined by a vector field in term of topological entropy of a flow are presented