Related papers: Physical limit to concentration sensing amid spuri…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
This work reports on two results. At first we revisit the Berg and Purcell calculation that provides a lower bound to the error in concentration measurement by cells, by considering the realistic case when the cell starts measuring the…
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.…
Berg and Purcell [Biophys. J. 20, 193 (1977)] calculated how the accuracy of concentration sensing by single-celled organisms is limited by noise from the small number of counted molecules. Here we generalize their results to the sensing of…
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…
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…
Physical limit of molecular sensing has been extensively studied in biological systems. Biosensors are engineered equivalents of molecular sensors in living systems and play critical role in disease diagnosis and management. Investigation…
When a single cell senses a chemical gradient and chemotaxes, stochastic receptor-ligand binding can be a fundamental limit to the cell's accuracy. For clusters of cells responding to gradients, however, there is a critical difference: even…
The precision of concentration sensing is improved when cells communicate. Here we derive the physical limits to concentration sensing for cells that communicate over short distances by directly exchanging small molecules (juxtacrine…
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…
Position determination in biological systems is often achieved through protein concentration gradients. Measuring the local concentration of such a protein with a spatially-varying distribution allows the measurement of position within the…
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…
Artificially engineered biosensors are highly inefficient in accurately measuring the concentration of biomarkers, particularly, during early diagnosis of diseases. On the other hand, single cellular systems such as chemotactic bacteria can…