Impact of Population on the Mutual Information of Action Potential Driven Communication in Plants

This paper considers an electro-chemical signal based model for inter-cellular communication in plants. The input signal, composed of fast moving charged molecules is driven by an action potential (AP). APs, generated by an external stimulus, are part of the communication mechanism in plants. We extend the simple model for AP generation presented in previous work to incorporate the AP signal arriving from neighboring cells. Furthermore in this model we study the transfer of information between cells via fast moving ions. Unlike previous work, this paper does not consider diffusion but only reactions between molecules at each step. We then use an information-theoretic analysis to compute the mutual information between the input and output of this system. The key aim is to study the impact of an increase in population of cells on the mutual information. We calculate the mutual information for a large group of cells (up to 100) in three different topologies i.e., parallel, series and mixed. Finally we study the impact of a single AP on multiple cells in the system.