How cells do statistics? Inference, signal transduction and experimental design.

Living cells are forced to solve inference problems as they measure constantly changing parameters of their environment. Cellular biochemical machineries encode certain experimental procedures, which, at least to some extent, must have been evolutionary optimised. Statistical methodology of optimal experimental design, therefore, can provide insight about information processing and evolutionary adaptation of signal transduction networks. We therefore explored the analogy between inference and signal transduction to provide potential design principles of biochemical networks and informative experiments.