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REVIEW:
What is the intellectual merit of the proposed activity?
The intellectual merit of the proposal is to rigorously and systematically study the possibility of applying communications theory to intracellular and intercellular signaling. If successful, this approach can help bring deeper understanding not just in multicellular structures, including development, aging, cancer, but also engineering systems e.g. sensor networks.
What are the broader impacts of the proposed activity?
The broader impact in education is generally similar to any interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary projects -- an opportunity to educate students and researchers in the other disciplines. The effective communications framework for biological systems can have tremendous impact in broad biological areas from development to disease.
Summary Statement
The proposal offers a great idea to rigorously examine the application of communication theory to multicellular systems. The proposal is nicely written. It contains lots of background information, but not a lot of description of what to do exactly. It has clear potential high impact in terms of intellectual merit, but broader impacts in terms of education etc. are not as clear. The PIs are capable of conducting the proposed work.
One requirement for applying the communication theory is memoryless: it's not clear how this requirement is satisfied in biological systems.
Another important concept is energy constraint: how can energy constraint be accurately estimated/measured in complex biological systems?
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