Entropy: From 19th Century Steam Engines to 21st Century Cell Biology
Earlier posts on Cancer Ecology Commentary explored the role of epigenetic regulation as a window for understanding lineage plasticity, the ability for cells within an organ to reverse their fate either as a compensatory response in the face of injury to facilitate repair but risking the potentially deleterious shift towards non-homeostatic phenotypes and behaviors which oncologists refer to as the cancer hallmarks. Our understanding of this disrupted regulation was a product of epigenetic entropy, a form of information entropy as first described by Claude Shannon - the inevitable loss of accurate information obscured by noise occurring during information transfer. From the perspective of lineage plasticity, epigenetic entropy lowered the barrier for misdirected and potentially pathologic lineage transition. Given the importance of entropy in understanding epigenetics’ role in carcinogenesis, it might be useful to spend some time studying this property from the point of view ...