| Abstract
| - One powerful approach to understanding how cells process spatially variant signals is based on using micropatternedsubstrates to control the distribution of signaling molecules. However, quantifying spatially complex signals requiresan appropriate metric. Here we propose that the Shannon information theory formalism provides a robust and usefulway to quantify the organization of proteins in micropatterned systems. To demonstrate the use of informationalentropy as a metric, we produced patterns of lines of fibronectin with varying information content. Fibroblasts grownon these patterns were sensitive to very small changes in informational entropy (6.6 bits), and the responses dependedon the scale of the pattern.
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