Dresden 2026 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 16: Membranes, Vesicles and Synthetic Life-like Systems II
BP 16.3: Talk
Wednesday, March 11, 2026, 10:15–10:30, BAR/0205
Selective information processing by particle distributions at living interfaces — •Jenna Elliott1,2 and Anna Erzberger1,2 — 1European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg, Germany — 2University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany
Living cells are capable of responding to environmental cues under noisy conditions, even in the absence of a centralised control unit or brain. Such systems therefore provide an ideal platform for uncovering the physical principles behind robust, decentralised information processing in soft materials. Motivated by the role interfaces play in relaying signals across cell boundaries, we investigate how spatially-varying particle distributions on interfaces facilitate information transmission in living cells. Starting from a statistical description of particle dynamics, we show that these distributions act as signal filters that non-linearly amplify heterogeneities in their environment. This mechanism permits a form of pattern recognition, with inter-particle interactions tuning the response function of the filter. We explicitly identify both thresholding and edge-detecting regimes and, accounting for thermal noise in the filters, quantify the flow of information across the interface. We find that, when suitably tuned, the noisy filters selectively compress input signals, resulting in the efficient encoding of information relevant to downstream tasks. Overall, our results indicate that the noisy patterning of membranes may be used to selectively sense environmental cues in biologically inspired systems, suggesting exciting implications for how physical interactions may encode computational logic in soft materials.
Keywords: Information processing; Signalling; Membrane; Mechanobiology; Surfaces