Abstract

Organisms acquire and use sensory information to guide their behaviors. Likewise, scientists acquire and use the information contained in experimental data to understand systems of interest. In both cases, the amount of information available is limited, so using it efficiently is critical. In this talk, I will discuss two aspects of information usage. First, I explore information usage by cells, describing how we have discovered that motile E. coli cells acquire very little information but use it efficiently. Second, I examine information usage by scientists, elaborating on how faced with noisy fluorescence data from E. coli cells, we developed a method to extract relevant signals from raw data with theoretically maximal efficiency. Finally, I examine similarities between the two.

Bio Sketch

Keita Kamino is an Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of Molecular Biology in Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. Before joining IMB in 2022, he studied physics at the University of Tokyo, earned his PhD in biophysics in 2013 from the same institution, and did his postdoc at AMOLF in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Yale University in the USA. His major interest is in understanding principles governing adaptive cellular behavior and information processes through quantitative experiments and mathematical modeling.