Related papers: Fundamental Limits to Cellular Sensing
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
To adapt their behaviour in changing environments, cells sense concentrations by binding external ligands to their receptors. However, incorrect ligands may bind nonspecifically to receptors, and when their concentration is large, this…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Biological cells sense external chemical stimuli in their environment using cell-surface receptors. To increase the sensitivity of sensing, receptors often cluster, most noticeably in bacterial chemotaxis, a paradigm for signaling and…
When cells measure concentrations of chemical signals, they may average multiple measurements over time in order to reduce noise in their measurements. However, when cells are in a environment that changes over time, past measurements may…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…