Belousov et al., Phys. Rev. E 98 (2019).
During development an embryo is partitioned into distinct functional components down to a scale of micrometers. Whereas nonequilibrium processes create biochemical signals that encode the developmental plan of an organism, physical fluctuations act to erase this information. The present work uses the theory of statistical physics to predict the magnitude of these fluctuations. The obtained results connect information encoding with stochastic thermodynamics and define limits on the precision of developmental processes in biology.