How Noncommutative Logic explains biological growth: new Caltech Ph.D. thesis

In this paper we show how sequential logic outperforms combinatorial logic, and argue that noncommutative sequences underlie a number of cases of biological regulation, e.g. how a small number of signaling pathways generates a large diversity of cell types in development. In addition to explaining biological networks, sequential logic may be a general experimental design strategy in synthetic and single-cell biology.

Noncommutative Biology: Sequential Regulation of Complex Networks

https://thesis.library.caltech.edu/10966/155/Letsou_William_2018.pdf

 A number of examples show that noncommutativity may be a general strategy in other areas of biology. In hematopoietic stem cells, activation of GATA2 and C/EBPα in different orders results in different cell fates [39]. In neurobiology, different temporal orderings of the same inputs lead to distinct firing patterns [40–42]. In the field of synthetic biology, a DNA switch was developed that could detect the order in which invertase enzymes were applied [43]. And in evolutionary biology, the order in which mutations arise was recently implicated in determining a genotype’s fitness [44–47]. There is also accumulating evidence for sequential logic in transcriptional control: signaling molecules and TFs in mammalian cells, including ERK [48], NF-κB [49, 50], p53 [51], as well as in yeast [52–54] have been observed to pulse, suggesting that TF timing may be used to control the transcriptional state of the cell.

 

 yep! fascinating. Normal logic doesn't cut the mustard!



Very fascinating indeed!




this is what Gregory Bateson was trying to figure out but he didn't understand noncommutative logic!

Not many people do since Western logic is typically symmetric teaching.