Related papers: Memory improves precision of cell sensing in fluct…

We explore how different types and uses of memory can aid spatial navigation in changing uncertain environments. In the simple foraging task we study, every day, our agent has to find its way from its home, through barriers, to food.…

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…

Autologous chemotaxis, in which cells secrete and detect molecules to determine the direction of fluid flow, is thwarted at high cell density because molecules from other cells interfere with a given cell's signal. Using a minimal model of…

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…

Molecular recognition, which is essential in processing information in biological systems, takes place in a crowded noisy biochemical environment and requires the recognition of a specific target within a background of various similar…

In recent years considerable portion of the computer science community has focused its attention on understanding living cell biochemistry and efforts to understand such complication reaction environment have spread over wide front, ranging…

Spatial information from cell-surface receptors is crucial for processes that require signal processing and sensing of the environment. Here, we investigate the optimal placement of such receptors through a theoretical model that minimizes…

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…

We derive a new fluctuation-dissipation relation for non-equilibrium systems with long-term memory. We show how this relation allows one to access new experimental information regarding active forces in living cells that cannot otherwise be…

Cells can show not only spontaneous movement but also tactic responses to environmental signals. Since the former can be regarded as the basis to realize the latter, playing essential roles in various cellular functions, it is important to…

Despite being optimized, the information processing of biological organisms exhibits significant variability in its complexity and capability. One potential source of this diversity is the limitation of resources required for information…

The behaviour of an organism often reflects a strategy for coping with its environment. Such behaviour in higher organisms can often be reduced to a few stereotyped modes of movement due to physiological limitations, but finding such modes…

Many types of cells can sense external ligand concentrations with cell-surface receptors at extremely high accuracy. Interestingly, ligand-bound receptors are often internalized, a process also known as receptor-mediated endocytosis. While…

Adaptation of the chemotaxis sensory pathway of the bacterium Escherichia coli is integral for detecting chemicals over a wide range of background concentrations, ultimately allowing cells to swim towards sources of attractant and away from…

Neural fields are increasingly used as a light-weight, continuous, and differentiable signal representation in (bio)medical imaging. However, unlike discrete signal representations such as voxel grids, neural fields cannot be easily…

Many eukaryotic cells are able to perform directional mechanosensing by directly measuring minute spatial differences in the mechanical stress on their membranes. Here, we explore the limits of a single mechanosensitive channel activation…

Cells can utilize chemical communication to exchange information and coordinate their behavior in the presence of noise. Communication can reduce noise to shape a collective response, or amplify noise to generate distinct phenotypic…

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…

Biomolecules carry out very specialized tasks inside the cell where energies involved are few tens of k_BT, small enough for thermal fluctuations to be relevant in many biomolecular processes. In this paper I discuss a few concepts and…

Some visual search tasks require to memorize the location of stimuli that have been previously scanned. Considerations about the eye movements raise the question of how we are able to maintain a coherent memory, despite the frequent…