TY - CONF AB - Theoretical and numerical aspects of aerodynamic efficiency of propulsion systems coupled to the boundary layer of a fuselage are studied. We discuss the effects of local flow fields, which are affected both by conservative flow acceleration as well as total pressure losses, on the efficiency of boundary layer immersed propulsion devices. We introduce the concept of a boundary layer retardation turbine that helps reduce skin friction over the fuselage. We numerically investigate efficiency gains offered by boundary layer and wake interacting devices. We discuss the results in terms of a total energy consumption framework and show that efficiency gains of any device depend on all the other elements of the propulsion system. AU - Mikić, Gregor AU - Stoll, Alex AU - Bevirt, Joe AU - Grah, Rok AU - Moore, Mark ID - 1220 TI - Fuselage boundary layer ingestion propulsion applied to a thin haul commuter aircraft for optimal efficiency ER - TY - JOUR AB - A crucial step in the regulation of gene expression is binding of transcription factor (TF) proteins to regulatory sites along the DNA. But transcription factors act at nanomolar concentrations, and noise due to random arrival of these molecules at their binding sites can severely limit the precision of regulation. Recent work on the optimization of information flow through regulatory networks indicates that the lower end of the dynamic range of concentrations is simply inaccessible, overwhelmed by the impact of this noise. Motivated by the behavior of homeodomain proteins, such as the maternal morphogen Bicoid in the fruit fly embryo, we suggest a scheme in which transcription factors also act as indirect translational regulators, binding to the mRNA of other regulatory proteins. Intuitively, each mRNA molecule acts as an independent sensor of the input concentration, and averaging over these multiple sensors reduces the noise. We analyze information flow through this scheme and identify conditions under which it outperforms direct transcriptional regulation. Our results suggest that the dual role of homeodomain proteins is not just a historical accident, but a solution to a crucial physics problem in the regulation of gene expression. AU - Sokolowski, Thomas R AU - Walczak, Aleksandra AU - Bialek, William AU - Tkacik, Gasper ID - 1242 IS - 2 JF - Physical Review E Statistical Nonlinear and Soft Matter Physics TI - Extending the dynamic range of transcription factor action by translational regulation VL - 93 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Cell polarity refers to a functional spatial organization of proteins that is crucial for the control of essential cellular processes such as growth and division. To establish polarity, cells rely on elaborate regulation networks that control the distribution of proteins at the cell membrane. In fission yeast cells, a microtubule-dependent network has been identified that polarizes the distribution of signaling proteins that restricts growth to cell ends and targets the cytokinetic machinery to the middle of the cell. Although many molecular components have been shown to play a role in this network, it remains unknown which molecular functionalities are minimally required to establish a polarized protein distribution in this system. Here we show that a membrane-binding protein fragment, which distributes homogeneously in wild-type fission yeast cells, can be made to concentrate at cell ends by attaching it to a cytoplasmic microtubule end-binding protein. This concentration results in a polarized pattern of chimera proteins with a spatial extension that is very reminiscent of natural polarity patterns in fission yeast. However, chimera levels fluctuate in response to microtubule dynamics, and disruption of microtubules leads to disappearance of the pattern. Numerical simulations confirm that the combined functionality of membrane anchoring and microtubule tip affinity is in principle sufficient to create polarized patterns. Our chimera protein may thus represent a simple molecular functionality that is able to polarize the membrane, onto which additional layers of molecular complexity may be built to provide the temporal robustness that is typical of natural polarity patterns. AU - Recouvreux, Pierre AU - Sokolowski, Thomas R AU - Grammoustianou, Aristea AU - Tenwolde, Pieter AU - Dogterom, Marileen ID - 1244 IS - 7 JF - PNAS TI - Chimera proteins with affinity for membranes and microtubule tips polarize in the membrane of fission yeast cells VL - 113 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Life depends as much on the flow of information as on the flow of energy. Here we review the many efforts to make this intuition precise. Starting with the building blocks of information theory, we explore examples where it has been possible to measure, directly, the flow of information in biological networks, or more generally where information-theoretic ideas have been used to guide the analysis of experiments. Systems of interest range from single molecules (the sequence diversity in families of proteins) to groups of organisms (the distribution of velocities in flocks of birds), and all scales in between. Many of these analyses are motivated by the idea that biological systems may have evolved to optimize the gathering and representation of information, and we review the experimental evidence for this optimization, again across a wide range of scales. AU - Tkacik, Gasper AU - Bialek, William ID - 1248 JF - Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics TI - Information processing in living systems VL - 7 ER - TY - JOUR AB - In this work, the Gardner problem of inferring interactions and fields for an Ising neural network from given patterns under a local stability hypothesis is addressed under a dual perspective. By means of duality arguments, an integer linear system is defined whose solution space is the dual of the Gardner space and whose solutions represent mutually unstable patterns. We propose and discuss Monte Carlo methods in order to find and remove unstable patterns and uniformly sample the space of interactions thereafter. We illustrate the problem on a set of real data and perform ensemble calculation that shows how the emergence of phase dominated by unstable patterns can be triggered in a nonlinear discontinuous way. AU - De Martino, Daniele ID - 1260 IS - 6 JF - International Journal of Modern Physics C TI - The dual of the space of interactions in neural network models VL - 27 ER -