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Insights about collective decision-making at the genetic level

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Abstract

By living in a collective, individuals can share and aggregate information to base their decisions on the many rather than on the one, thereby increasing accuracy. But a collective can also be defined at the molecular level. In the following, we reason that genes, by working collectively, share fundamental features with social organisms, which ends, without invoking cognition, in wiser responses. For that, we compile into a single picture the terms redundancy, stochastic resonance, intrinsic and extrinsic noise, and cross-regulation.

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Acknowledgements

G.R. wishes to express deep gratitude to Drs. M.C. Baquero and L.M. Floria (Hospital La Fe, Valencia) for their kind attention.

Funding

This work was supported by grants BFU2015-66894-P (MINECO/FEDER) and GV/2016/079 (GVA).

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  1. Institute for Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio), CSIC – U. Valencia, 46980, Paterna, Spain

    Guillermo Rodrigo

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  1. Guillermo Rodrigo
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Correspondence to Guillermo Rodrigo.

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Rodrigo, G. Insights about collective decision-making at the genetic level. Biophys Rev 12, 19–24 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12551-019-00608-0

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