Related papers: Know the single-receptor sensing limit? Think agai…
Information of relevance to the organism often is represented by the concentrations of particular molecules inside a cell. As outside observers we can now measure these concentrations precisely, but the cell's own mechanisms must be…
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…
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…
This paper demonstrates fundamental limits of sensor networks for detection problems where the number of hypotheses is exponentially large. Such problems characterize many important applications including detection and classification of…
Chemotactic cells of eukaryotic organisms are able to accurately sense shallow chemical concentration gradients using cell-surface receptors. This sensing ability is remarkable as cells must be able to spatially resolve small fractional…
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…
In this paper, diffusion-based molecular commu- nication with ligand receptor receivers is studied. Information messages are assumed to be encoded via variations of the con- centration of molecules. The randomness in the ligand reception…
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…
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.…
We investigate single-cell directional sensing from diffusing chemoattractant signals released by a localized source. We focus on the low-concentration regime in which receptor activity is discrete and cellular decisions are made on…
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…
The formation and dissociation of specific noncovalent interactions between a variety of macromolecules play a crucial role in the function of biological systems. During the last few years, three main lines of research led to a dramatic…
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…
How can cells embedded into a gradient concentration triangulate the position of the source and migrate toward their final destination? The source triangulation requires to recover the three dimensional coordinates of the source from the…
Clinical biosensors with low detection limit hold significant promise in the early diagnosis of debilitating diseases. Recent progress in sensor development has led to the demonstration of detection capable of detecting target molecules…
In genetic networks, information of relevance to the organism is represented by the concentrations of transcription factor molecules. In order to extract this information the cell must effectively "measure"' these concentrations, but there…
Biological sensory receptors provide excellent examples of microscopic scale information transduction amidst stochastic noise. We argue that stochasticity is not always a hindrance to sensing. Instead, it could allow a single stochastic…
Constitutive relations describe how materials respond to external stimuli such as forces. All materials respond heterogeneously at small scales, which limits what a localized sensor can discern about the global constitution of a material.…
Cellular signaling is essential in information processing and decision making. Therefore, a variety of experimental approaches have been developed to study signaling on bulk and single-cell level. Single-cell measurements of signaling…
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…