Related papers: Maximum likelihood and the single receptor

In molecular communications, the direct detection of signaling molecules may be challenging due to a lack of suitable sensors and interference in the environment. Motivated by research in molecular biology, we investigate an indirect…

Cells sense and predict their environment via energy-dissipating pathways. However, it is unclear whether dissipation helps or harms prediction. Here we study dissipation and prediction for a minimal sensory module of receptors that…

Gradient sensing requires at least two measurements at different points in space. These measurements must then be communicated to a common location to be compared, which is unavoidably noisy. While much is known about the limits of…

An agent acquires information dynamically until her belief about a binary state reaches an upper or lower threshold. She can choose any signal process subject to a constraint on the rate of entropy reduction. Strategies are ordered by "time…

Eukaryotic cells sense chemical gradients to decide where and when to move. Clusters of cells can sense gradients more accurately than individual cells by integrating measurements of the concentration made across the cluster. Is this…

Cells are often considered input-output devices that maximize the transmission of information by converting extracellular stimuli (input) via signaling pathways (communication channel) to cell behavior (output). However, in biological…

Cells measure concentrations of external ligands by capturing ligand molecules with cell surface receptors. The numbers of molecules captured by different receptors co-vary because they depend on the same extrinsic ligand fluctuations.…

The living cell uses a variety of molecular receptors to read and process chemical signals that vary in space and time. We model the dynamics of such molecular level measurements as Markov processes in steady state, with a coupling between…

It is widely believed that the perceptual system of an organism is optimized for the properties of the environment to which it is exposed. A specific instance of this principle known as the Infomax principle holds that the purpose of early…

Biomolecular condensates form on timescales of seconds in cells upon environmental or compositional changes. Condensate formation is thus argued to act as a mechanism for sensing such changes and quickly initiating downstream processes,…

Most sensory cells use cross-membrane chemoreceptors to detect chemical signals in the environment. The biochemical properties and spatial organization of chemoreceptors play important roles in achieving and maintaining sensitivity and…

Cell-cell communication is often achieved by secreted signaling molecules that bind membrane-bound receptors. A common class of such receptors are G-protein coupled receptors, where extracellular binding induces changes on the membrane…

Organisms use specialized sensors to measure their environments, but the fundamental principles that determine their accuracy remain largely unknown. In Escherichia coli chemotaxis, we previously found that gradient-climbing speed is…

Cells need to reliably sense external ligand concentrations to achieve various biological functions such as chemotaxis or signaling. The molecular recognition of ligands by surface receptors is degenerate in many systems leading to…

Living cells use readout molecules to record the state of receptor proteins, similar to measurements or copies in typical computational devices. But is this analogy rigorous? Can cells be optimally efficient, and if not, why? We show that,…

Here we characterized an information measure for cell polarity that applies to non-motile cells responding to a chemical gradient. The central idea is that polarization represents information about the direction of the gradient. We applied…

Diffusion of molecules within biological cells and tissues is strongly influenced by crowding. A key quantity to characterize diffusion is the particle lifetime, which is the time taken for a diffusing particle to exit by hitting an…

Living cells can enhance their fitness by anticipating environmental change. We study how accurately linear signaling networks in cells can predict future signals. We find that maximal predictive power results from a combination of…

Living cells presumably employ optimized information transfer methods, enabling efficient communication even in noisy environments. As expected, the efficiency of chemical communications between cells depends on the properties of the…

Biological cells sense external chemical stimuli in their environment using cell-surface receptors. To increase the sensitivity of sensing, receptors often cluster, most noticeably in bacterial chemotaxis, a paradigm for signaling and…