Related papers: Memory improves precision of cell sensing in fluct…
Cells are constantly exposed to diverse stimuli-chemical, mechanical, or electrical-that guide their movement. In physiological conditions, these signals often overlap, as seen during infections, where neutrophils and dendritic cells…
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…
The living cell expends energetic and material resources to reliably process information from its environment. To do so, it utilises unreliable molecular circuitry that is subject to thermal and other fluctuations. Here, we argue that…
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…
We present a method that captures the fluctuations beyond mean field in chemical reactions in the regime of small copy numbers and hence large fluctuations, using self-consistently determined memory: by integrating information from the past…
We investigate single-cell directional sensing from diffusing chemoattractant signals released by a localized source. We focus on the low-concentration regime in which receptor activity is discrete and cellular decisions are made on…
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.…
Cell decision-making refers to the process by which cells gather information from their local microenvironment and regulate their internal states to create appropriate responses. Microenvironmental cell sensing plays a key role in this…
Biological molecular machines are enzymes that simultaneously catalyze two processes, one donating free energy and second accepting it. Recent studies show that most native protein enzymes have a rich stochastic dynamics that often…
Adaptive response to a varying environment is a common feature of biological organisms. Reproducing such features in electronic systems and circuits is of great importance for a variety of applications. Here, we consider memory models…
Spatial heterogeneity is a hallmark of living systems, even at the molecular scale in individual cells. A key example is the partitioning of membrane-bound proteins via lipid domain formation or cytoskeleton-induced corralling. Yet the…
The adaptive immune system provides a diverse set of molecules that can mount specific responses against a multitude of pathogens. Memory is a key feature of adaptive immunity, which allows organisms to respond more readily upon…
Many chemotactic bacteria inhabit environments in which chemicals appear as localized pulses and evolve by processes such as diffusion and mixing. We show that, in such environments, physical limits on the accuracy of temporal gradient…
We introduce a generic, purely mechanical model for environment sensitive motion of mammalian cells that is applicable to chemotaxis, haptotaxis, and durotaxis as modes of motility. It is able to theoretically explain all relevant…
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…
Sensory systems have evolved to respond to input stimuli of certain statistical properties, and to reliably transmit this information through biochemical pathways. Hence, for an experimentally well-characterized sensory system, one ought to…
Directional chemosensing is ubiquitous in cell biology, but some cells such as mating yeast paradoxically degrade the signal they aim to detect. While the data processing inequality suggests that such signal modification cannot increase the…
Biological systems sense and extract information from fluctuating signals while operating under energetic constraints and limited resolution. We introduce a general chemical model in which a sensor, coupled to a signaling pathway activated…
Chemotactic cells establish cell polarity in the absence of external guidance cues. Such self-organized polarity is induced by spontaneous symmetry breaking in the intracellular activities, which produces an emergent memory effect…
Many eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells can exhibit remarkable sensing ability under small gradient of chemical compound. In this study, we approach this phenomenon by considering the contribution of multiple ligands to the chemical kinetics…