Identification of brain-like functional information architectures in embryonic tissue of Xenopus laevis.
Understanding how populations of cells collectively coordinate activity to produce the complex structures and behaviors that characterize multicellular organisms, and which coordinated activities, if any, survive processes that reshape cells and tissues into organoids, are fundamental issues in modern biology. Here we show how techniques from complex systems and multivariate information theory provide a framework for inferring the structure of collective organization in non-neural tissue. Many of these techniques were developed in the context of theoretical neuroscience, where these statistics have been found to be altered during different cognitive, clinical, or behavioral states, and are generally thought to be informative about the underlying dynamics linking biology to cognition. Here we show that these same patterns of coordinated activity are also present in the aneural tissues of evolutionarily distant biological systems: preparations of embryonic Xeno-pus laevis tissue (known as "basal Xenobots"). These similarities suggest that such patterns of activity either arose independently in these two systems (epithelial constructs and brains); are epiphenomenological byproducts of other dynamics conserved across vastly different configurations of life; or somehow directly support adaptive behavior across diverse living systems. Finally, these results provide unambiguous support for the hypothesis that, despite their apparent simplicity as collections of non-neural epithelial cells, Xenobots are in fact integrated, complex systems in their own right, with sophisticated internal information structures.