Extracting Information from Stochastic Trajectories of Gene Expression

Abstract: Gene expression is a stochastic process in which cells produce biomolecules essential to the function of life. Modern experimental methods allow for the measurement of biomolecules at single-cell and single-molecule resolution over time. Mathematical models are used to make sense of these experiments. The codesign of experiments and models allows one to use models to design optimal experiments, and to find experiments which provide as much information as possible about relevant model parameters. Here, we provide a formulation of Fisher information for trajectories sampled from the continuous time Markov processes often used to model biological systems, and apply the result to potentially correlated measurements of stochastic gene expression. We validate the result on two commonly used models of gene expression and show it can be used to optimize measurement periods for simulated single-cell fluorescence microscopy experiments. Finally, we use a connection between Fisher information and mutual information to derive channel capacities of nonlinearly regulated gene expression.