Related papers: Know the single-receptor sensing limit? Think agai…

We typically think of cells as responding to external signals independently by regulating their gene expression levels, yet they often locally exchange information and coordinate. Can such spatial coupling be of benefit for conveying…

Biological cells are often found to sense their chemical environment near the single-molecule detection limit. Surprisingly, this precision is higher than simple estimates of the fundamental physical limit, hinting towards active sensing…

The integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), in which the sensing and communication share the same frequency band and hardware, has emerged as a key technology in future wireless systems. Early works on ISAC have been focused on the…

A cell routinely responds to one of many competing environmental cues. A fundamental question is whether the cell follows the cue prioritized by its internal signaling network or the cue that carries the most external information. We…

Measuring the statistical dependence between observed signals is a primary tool for scientific discovery. However, biological systems often exhibit complex non-linear interactions that currently cannot be captured without a priori knowledge…

Living cells use readout molecules to record the state of receptor proteins, similar to measurements or copies in typical computational devices. But is this analogy rigorous? Can cells be optimally efficient, and if not, why? We show that,…

Many eukaryotic cells are able to perform directional mechanosensing by directly measuring minute spatial differences in the mechanical stress on their membranes. Here, we explore the limits of a single mechanosensitive channel activation…

Biological signaling is imagined as a combination of activation and transport. The former is triggered by local molecular interactions and the latter is the result of molecular diffusion. However, other fundamental physical principles of…

Intracellular signaling often arises from ligand-induced oligomerization of cell surface receptors. This oligomerization or clustering process is fundamentally a cooperative behavior between near-neighbor receptor molecules; the properties…

Living cells sense noisy biochemical signals crucial for survival, yet models incorporating intracellular signaling are limited. This study examines how cells sense chemotactic concentrations through phosphorylation readouts in Ca2+…

Eukaryotic cells are able to sense chemical gradients in a wide range of environments. We show that, if a cell is exposed to a highly variable environment, it may gain chemotactic accuracy by expressing multiple receptor types with varying…

Biological systems, from cells to organisms, must respond to the ever changing environment in order to survive and function. This is not a simple task given the often random nature of the signals they receive, as well as the intrinsically…

For a general sensory system following an external stochastic signal, we introduce the sensory capacity. This quantity characterizes the performance of a sensor: sensory capacity is maximal if the instantaneous state of the sensor has as…

Ligand-receptor interactions constitute a fundamental mechanism of cell-cell communication and signaling. NicheNet is a well-established computational tool that infers ligand-receptor interactions that potentially regulate gene expression…

We present an alternative take on the recently popularized concept of `\textit{joint sensing and communications}', which focuses on using communication resources also for sensing. Here, we propose the opposite, where we utilize the…

In order to survive, reproduce and (in multicellular organisms) differentiate, cells must control the concentrations of the myriad different proteins that are encoded in the genome. The precision of this control is limited by the inevitable…

A state-dependent discrete memoryless multiple access channel is considered to model an integrated sensing and communication system, where two transmitters wish to convey messages to a receiver while simultaneously estimating the state…

Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how…

Cells continuously sense their surroundings to detect modifications and generate responses. Very often changes in extracellular concentrations initiate signaling cascades that eventually result in changes in gene expression. Increasing…

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…