8 papers · ranked by Valyu relevance
Yun-Fei Liu, Marina Bedny
Programming is a cornerstone of modern society, yet its cognitive and neural basis remains poorly understood. In this study, we test the hypothesis that programming “recycles” pre-existing neural mechanisms and representations in fronto-parietal reasoning networks. Using fMRI, we scanned programming-naïve…
Matthew Shang, Eric Klavins, Gilbert Bernstein
Formalizing protocols used in wetlab biological research as programs improves reproducibility by making protocols replicable and standardized. However, existing protocol languages have limited capacity for codifying error sources and standardizing error handling. When protocols inevitably go wrong, debugging must still…
George Chao, Evan Appleton, Clair S. Gutierrez, Lilia Evgeniou + 4 more
Pluripotent cells specialize into numerous cell types by receiving external signals, making fate decisions, and executing differentiation functions – a paradigm similar to computer algorithms. While advances in biosensor design have enabled cells to respond to diverse stimuli, the ability to maintain a synthetic memory…
Michael A. Boemo, Luca Cardelli, Conrad A. Nieduszynski
Biological systems are made up of components that change their actions (and interactions) over time and coordinate with other components nearby. Together with a large state space, the complexity of this behaviour can make it difficult to create concise mathematical models that can be easily extended or modified. This…
Tristan Stérin, Abeer Eshra, Janet Adio, Constantine Glen Evans + 1 more
Like life, computers are out-of-equilibrium.^1,2^ Thermodynamically favoured error states are thwarted by energetically-costly processes such as kinetic proofreading of biological polymers, error-correcting codes in computer data storage, and redundancy in molecular programming. Decades of theoretical work shows that…
Aurel A. Lazar, Mehmet Kerem Turkcan, Yiyin Zhou
The Drosophila brain has only a fraction of the number of neurons of higher organisms such as mice. Yet the sheer complexity of its neural circuits recently revealed by large connectomics datasets suggests that computationally modeling the function of fruit fly brain at this scale posits significant challenges. To…
Fabien Campagne, William ER Digan, Manuele Simi
Data analysis tools have become essential to the study of biology. Tools available today were constructed with layers of technology developed over decades. Here, we explain how some of the principles used to develop this technology are sub-optimal for the construction of data analysis tools for biologists. In contrast…
Rémi Segretain, Sergiu Ivanov, Laurent Trilling, Nicolas Glade
Formal interaction networks are well suited for representing complex biological systems and have been used to model signalling pathways, gene regulatory networks, interaction within ecosystems, etc. In this paper, we introduce Sign Boolean Networks (SBNs), which are a uniform variant of Threshold Boolean Networks…