Related papers: Know the single-receptor sensing limit? Think agai…
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…
Many types of cells are able to accurately sense shallow gradients of chemicals across their diameters, allowing the cells to move towards or away from chemical sources. This chemotactic ability relies on the remarkable capacity of cells to…
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…
Experimental evidence lends support to the conjecture that the ability of chains of cells to sense the gradient of an external chemical concentration could rely on cell-to-cell communication. This is the basis for the gradient sensing…
Biological cells, by definition, are the basic units which contain the fundamental molecules of life of which all living things are composed. Understanding how they function and differentiating cells from one another therefore is of…
Cells sense and predict their environment via energy-dissipating pathways. However, it is unclear whether dissipation helps or harms prediction. Here we study dissipation and prediction for a minimal sensory module of receptors that…
Most sensory cells use cross-membrane chemoreceptors to detect chemical signals in the environment. The biochemical properties and spatial organization of chemoreceptors play important roles in achieving and maintaining sensitivity and…
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…
Molecular Communications (MC) is a bio-inspired communication technique that uses molecules to transfer information among bio-nano devices. In this paper, we focus on the detection problem for biological MC receivers employing ligand…
In this paper, we consider the bacterial point-to-point communication problem with one transmitter and one receiver by considering the ligand receptor binding process. The most commonly investigated signalling model, referred to as the…
Cells actively probe and respond to the stiffness of their surroundings. Since mechanosensory cells in connective tissue are surrounded by a disordered network of biopolymers, their in vivo mechanical environment can be extremely…
Here we analyze synaptic transmission from an information-theoretic perspective. We derive closed-form expressions for the lower-bounds on the capacity of a simple model of a cortical synapse under two explicit coding paradigms. Under the…
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…
Most sensory cells use surface receptors to detect environmental stimuli and initiate downstream signaling. Cooperative interactions among sensory receptors is known to play a crucial role in enhancing the sensitivity of biochemical…
In cellular networks, inter-cell interference management has been studied for decades, yet its real-world effectiveness remains under-explored. To bridge this gap, we conduct a first measurement study of inter-cell interference for…
We investigate performance bounds for feedback control of distributed plants where the controller can be centralized (i.e. it has access to measurements from the whole plant), but sensors only measure differences between neighboring…
Turing mechanisms can yield a large variety of patterns from noisy, homogenous initial conditions and have been proposed as patterning mechanism for many developmental processes. However, the molecular components that give rise to Turing…
Collective cell responses to exogenous cues depend on cell-cell interactions. In principle, these can result in enhanced sensitivity to weak and noisy stimuli. However, this has not yet been shown experimentally, and, little is known about…
Cellular decision-making based on information received from the external environment is frequently initiated by transmembrane receptors. These receptors are known to propagate such information by triggering a series of irreversible,…
A large number of eukaryotic cells are able to directly detect external chemical gradients with great accuracy and the ultimate limit to their sensitivity has been a topic of debate for many years. Previous work has been done to understand…