Information theory for instructed and self-organized development

Development relies on the ability of cells to reliably organize into patterns of different cell types that underlie the formation of tissues and organs, with or without the use of external cues. However, how to generically quantify the patterning performance of different developmental systems has remained unclear. We start by reviewing our past work that formalized positional information during externally-cued patterning in the language of bits. Our new work extends this concept to a wide range of self-organized developmental models. This information-theoretic approach allows us to derive ab initio predictions about biological systems, which we demonstrate on the gap gene network for early fruit fly development, as well as on models of lateral inhibition, cell type proportioning, and reaction-diffusion patterning.