Related papers: Physical limit to concentration sensing amid spuri…

Living cells often need to extract information from biochemical signals that are noisy. We study how accurately cells can measure chemical concentrations with signaling networks that are linear. For stationary signals of long duration, they…

Eukaryotic cells perform chemotaxis by determining the direction of chemical gradients based on stochastic sensing of concentrations at the cell surface. To examine the efficiency of this process, previous studies have investigated the…

Molecular Communications (MC) uses molecules as information carriers between nanomachines. MC channel in practice can be crowded with different types of molecules, i.e., ligands, which can have similar binding properties causing severe…

Here we characterized an information measure for cell polarity that applies to non-motile cells responding to a chemical gradient. The central idea is that polarization represents information about the direction of the gradient. We applied…

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…

Binary fluorescence time series obtained from single-molecule imaging experiments can be used to infer protein binding kinetics, in particular, association and dissociation rate constants from waiting time statistics of fluorescence…

We introduce a derangement model of ligand-receptor binding that allows us to quantitatively frame the question "How can ligands seek out and bind to their optimal receptor sites in a sea of other competing ligands and suboptimal receptor…

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…

Living cells deploy many resources to sense their environments, including receptors, downstream signaling molecules, time and fuel. However, it is not known which resources fundamentally limit the precision of sensing, like weak links in a…

To successfully navigate chemical gradients, microorganisms need to predict how the ligand concentration changes in space. Due to their limited size, they do not take a spatial derivative over their body length but rather a temporal…

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…

Many eukaryotic cells are able to sense chemical gradients by directly measuring spatial concentration differences. The precision of such gradient sensing is limited by fluctuations in the binding of diffusing particles to specific…

Cells that collide with each other repolarize away from contact, in a process called contact inhibition of locomotion (CIL), which is necessary for correct development of the embryo. CIL can occur even when cells make a micron-scale contact…

We present a theory of unbinding transitions for membranes that interact via short and long receptor/ligand bonds. The detail of unbinding behavior of the membranes is governed by the binding energies and concentrations of receptors and…

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…

The mean time for a diffusing ligand to activate a target protein located on the surface of a microdomain can regulate cellular signaling. When the ligand switches between various states induced by chemical interactions or conformational…

A one-dimensional diagonal tight binding electronic system with correlated disorder is investigated. The correlation of the random potential is exponentially decaying with distance and its correlation length diverges as the concentration of…

Accurate sensing of chemical concentrations is essential for numerous biological processes. The accuracy of this sensing, for small numbers of molecules, is limited by shot noise. Corresponding theoretical limits on sensing precision, as a…

The adhesion of biological membranes is controlled by various types of receptor and ligand molecules. In this letter, we present a statistical-mechanical model for membranes that interact via receptor/ligand bonds of two different lengths.…

Living cells sense their environment through the binding of extra-cellular molecular ligands to cell surface receptors. Puzzlingly, vast numbers of signaling pathways exhibit a high degree of cross talk between different signals whereby…