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Associate Professor
School of Mathematics University of Bristol, U.K. |
Special Issue 'Information Theory in Complex Systems'
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Submit until December 2018
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What is a complex system?
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Entropy landscape of stem cells
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This question is still not fully answered. Complex systems consist of many elements with many interactions between them. Their macroscopic behaviour is largely unpredictable from the elements alone because of feedback and noise. Many of the most profound and important theoretical and practical questions in science, medicine and society are now addressed with the ideas and methods of complexity science.
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The metaphor of a potential epigenetic differentiation landscape suggests that during differentiation a stem cell follows the steepest descending gradient toward a stable equilibrium state which represents the final cell type. It has been conjectured that there is an analogy to the concept of entropy in statistical mechanics. In order to assess these predictions, we computed the Shannon entropy single-cell gene expression data. We find that the Shannon entropy is not decreasing but instead it increases toward the point of commitment before decreasing again. This indicates the importance of noise in cellular development.
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