Information Processing in Noisy Biological Systems

Biological systems need to process information accurately with noisy components and stochastic chemical reactions, and in fluctuating environments. How do we quantify these different noise sources? What are the origins of the different noises? How do biological systems overcome these different levels of noises to carry out their normal functions in particular information processing? On the other hand, biological diversity is needed to improve fitness of a population in changing environment. Whether and how do biological systems take advantage of and control their intrinsic variability to improve the population level fitness? These are some of the questions we will focus on to address in this Gordon Research Conference.