Our study addresses a fundamental question in living systems: how synchronization of a group emerges from the interactions of individual cells, each making stochastic decisions based on their autonomous state and noisy cues from their local environment?
We identified three key single cells functions that contribute to collective information processing. Division of labor, where single cells take differentiated functional roles in collective information processing; Cell memory, where single cells maintain and reinforce their specified functional roles in cell-cell communication in response to repeated external stimuli; And information flow, where the information gradually propagates spatially from the scale of single cells to eventually synchronize the collective.
The manuscript was led by Amos Zamir from the lab and is a joint project with Bo Sun from Oregon State University.
Twitter summary: https://twitter.com/AssafZaritsky/status/1310637975550787597
