Related papers: Large number of receptors may reduce cellular resp…
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…
T cell receptor signaling must operate reliably under tight time constraints. While assuming quite different mechanisms, two prominent models of T cell receptor activation, kinetic segregation and kinetic proofreading, both introduce a…
Collective oscillation of cells in a population has been reported under diverse biological contexts and with vastly different molecular constructs. Could there be common principles similar to those that govern spontaneous oscillation in…
Cells constantly need to monitor the state of the environment to detect changes and timely respond. The detection of concentration changes of a ligand by a set of receptors can be cast as a problem of hypothesis testing, and the cell viewed…
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…
Multivalency is prevalent in various biological systems and applications due to the superselectivity that arises from the cooperativity of multivalent binding. Traditionally, it was thought that weaker individual binding would improve the…
Cortical sensory neurons are known to be highly variable, in the sense that responses evoked by identical stimuli often change dramatically from trial to trial. The origin of this variability is uncertain, but it is usually interpreted as…
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 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…
We model the kinetics of ligand-receptor systems, where multiple ligands may bind and unbind to the receptor, either randomly or in a specific order. Equilibrium occupation and first occurrence of complete filling of the receptor are…
Cell signaling networks are complex and often incompletely characterized, making it difficult to obtain a comprehensive picture of the mechanisms they encode. Mathematical modeling of these networks provides important clues, but the models…
Living cells often need to measure chemical concentrations that vary in time. To this end, they deploy many resources, e.g. receptors, downstream signaling molecules, time and energy. Here, we present a theory for the optimal design of a…
Most sensory cells use surface receptors to detect environmental stimuli and initiate downstream signaling. Cooperative interactions among sensory receptors is known to play a crucial role in enhancing the sensitivity of biochemical…
Nanoparticles functionalized with multiple ligands can be programmed to bind biological targets depending on the receptors they express, providing a general mechanism exploited in various technologies, from selective drug-delivery to…
Biological cells are able to accurately sense chemicals with receptors at their surfaces, allowing cells to move towards sources of attractant and away from sources of repellent. The accuracy of sensing chemical concentration is ultimately…
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…
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…
The metabolic network of a living cell involves several hundreds or thousands of interconnected biochemical reactions. Previous research has shown that under realistic conditions only a fraction of these reactions is concurrently active in…
Stimulus from the environment that guides behavior and informs decisions is encoded in the firing rates of neural populations. Each neuron in the populations, however, does not spike independently: spike events are correlated from cell to…
Cellular decision-making based on information received from the external environment is frequently initiated by transmembrane receptors. These receptors are known to propagate such information by triggering a series of irreversible,…