Memory in Microbes: Quantifying History-Dependent Behavior in a Bacterium
Figure 7
Estimates of cell-history memory and mutual information in B. subtilis.
The upper left bar plot shows our estimate of long-term (blue bars) and short-term (first 11 hours, red bars) memory fidelity (% of the maximum recoverable information about cell history) exhibited in starvation medium SM by sporulation initiation (PspoIIE-gfp expression), degradative enzyme synthesis (PaprE-dsred expression), and growth dynamics (OD600), and over all vector pairs of observable read-outs and the vector triple, with respect to the cell history space tested by our compendium. The lower right bar plot shows our estimate of the number of bits of mutual information shared by all pairs of short-term (red bars) and long-term (blue bars) observable signals in our memory data compendium. The surrounding flow diagram circuit illustrates the experimental and analytical scenario.