Related papers: Increased accuracy of ligand sensing by receptor i…
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.…
Cells use surface receptors to estimate the concentration of external ligands. Limits on the accuracy of such estimations have been well studied for pairs of ligand and receptor species. However, the environment typically contains many…
How cells reliably infer information about their environment is a fundamentally important question. While sensing and signaling generally start with cell-surface receptors, the degree of accuracy with which a cell can measure external…
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…
The physical limit with which a cell senses external ligand concentration corresponds to the perfect absorber, where all ligand particles are absorbed and overcounting of same ligand particles does not occur. Here we analyze how the lateral…
To adapt their behaviour in changing environments, cells sense concentrations by binding external ligands to their receptors. However, incorrect ligands may bind nonspecifically to receptors, and when their concentration is large, this…
Cells estimate concentrations of chemical ligands in their environment using a limited set of receptors. Recent work has shown that the temporal sequence of binding and unbinding events on just a single receptor can be used to estimate the…
Intracellular signaling often arises from ligand-induced oligomerization of cell surface receptors. This oligomerization or clustering process is fundamentally a cooperative behavior between near-neighbor receptor molecules; the properties…
Cells adapt to changing environments by sensing ligand concentrations using specific receptors. The accuracy of sensing is ultimately limited by the finite number of ligand molecules bound by receptors. Previously derived physical limits to…
Receptor-mediated endocytosis is an ubiquitous process through which cells internalize biological or synthetic nanoscale objects, including viruses, unicellular parasites, and nanomedical vectors for drug or gene delivery. In passive…
Metastatic cancer cells detect the direction of lymphatic flow by self-communication: they secrete and detect a chemical which, due to the flow, returns to the cell surface anisotropically. The secretion rate is low, meaning detection noise…
In recent years experiments have demonstrated that living cells can measure low chemical concentrations with high precision, and much progress has been made in understanding what sets the fundamental limit to the precision of chemical…
The formation and dissociation of specific noncovalent interactions between a variety of macromolecules play a crucial role in the function of biological systems. During the last few years, three main lines of research led to a dramatic…
Cells continuously probe their environment with membrane receptors, achieving subsecond adaptation of their behaviour [1-3]. Recently, several receptors, including cadherins, were found to bind ligands with a lifetime of order of one…
Biological sensory systems generally operate out of equilibrium, which often leads to their improved performance. Here, we study the sensitivity of ligand concentration for a general receptor model, which is generally in the non-equilibrium…
Eukaryotic cells generally sense chemical gradients using the binding of chemical ligands to membrane receptors. In order to perform chemotaxis effectively in different environments, cells need to adapt to different concentrations. We…
Molecular Communications (MC) is a bio-inspired communication technique that uses molecules to transfer information among bio-nano devices. In this paper, we focus on the detection problem for biological MC receivers employing ligand…
In biological cells and novel diagnostic devices biochemical receptors need to be sensitive to extremely small concentration changes of signaling molecules. The accuracy of such molecular signaling is ultimately limited by the counting…
Chemotactic cells of eukaryotic organisms are able to accurately sense shallow chemical concentration gradients using cell-surface receptors. This sensing ability is remarkable as cells must be able to spatially resolve small fractional…
Cells in natural environments like tissue or soil sense and respond to extracellular ligands with intricately structured and non-monotonic spatial distributions that are sculpted by processes such as fluid flow and substrate adhesion.…