Related papers: Signal focusing through active transport

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…

The precision of biochemical signaling is limited by randomness in the diffusive arrival of molecules at their targets. For proteins binding to the specific sites on the DNA and regulating transcription, the ability of the proteins to…

In various biological systems information from many noisy molecular receptors must be integrated into a collective response. A striking example is the thermal imaging organ of pit vipers. Single nerve fibers in the organ reliably respond to…

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.…

Bacterial chemotaxis is controlled by the signalling of a cluster of receptors. A cooperative model is presented, in which coupling between neighbouring receptor dimers enhances the sensitivity with which stimuli can be detected, without…

Cells often have tens of thousands of receptors, even though only a few activated receptors can trigger full cellular responses. Reasons for the overabundance of receptors remain unclear. We suggest that, in certain conditions, the large…

Molecular transport maintains cellular structures and functions. For example, lipid and protein diffusion sculpts the dynamic shapes and structures on the cell membrane that perform essential cellular functions, such as cell signaling.…

We study the role of active coupling on the transport properties of homogeneously charged macromolecules in an infinitely dilute solution. An enzyme becomes actively bound to a segment of the macromolecule, exerting an electrostatic force…

This article examines recent research in molecular communications from a telecommunications system design perspective. In particular, it focuses on channel models and state-of-the-art physical layer techniques. The goal is to provide a…

Single-cell studies often show significant phenotypic variability due to the stochastic nature of intra-cellular biochemical reactions. When the numbers of molecules, e.g., transcription factors and regulatory enzymes, are in low abundance,…

This paper presents an analytical comparison of active and passive receiver models in diffusive molecular communication. In the active model, molecules are absorbed when they collide with the receiver surface. In the passive model, the…

Molecular communication (MC) is a concept in communication engineering, where diffusive molecules are used to transmit information between nano or micro-scale chemical reaction systems. Engineering MC to control the reaction systems in…

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…

Biochemical signal transduction, a form of molecular communication, can be modeled using graphical Markov channels with input-modulated transition rates. Such channel models are strongly non-Gaussian. In this paper we use a linear noise…

Biological cells are often found to sense their chemical environment near the single-molecule detection limit. Surprisingly, this precision is higher than simple estimates of the fundamental physical limit, hinting towards active sensing…

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…

Biochemical reaction networks in living cells usually involve reversible covalent modification of signaling molecules, such as protein phosphorylation. Under conditions of small molecule numbers, as is frequently the case in living cells,…

Collective cell migration in response to a chemical cue occurs in many biological processes such as morphogenesis and cancer metastasis. Clusters of migratory cells in these systems are capable of responding to gradients of less than 1%…

Inside cells, various cargos are transported by teams of molecular motors. Intriguingly, the motors involved generally have opposite pulling directions, and the resulting cargo dynamics is a biased stochastic motion. It is an open question…

Mounting evidence shows that oscillatory activity is widespread in cell signaling. Here we review some of this recent evidence, focusing on both the molecular mechanisms that potentially underlie such dynamical behavior, and the potential…