Related papers: Positional information readout in $Ca^{2+}$ signal…

Individual components such as cells, particles, or agents within a larger system often require detailed understanding of their relative position to act accordingly, enabling the system as a whole to function in an organised and efficient…

Unicellular organisms are open metabolic systems that need to process information about their external environment in order to survive. In most types of tissues and organisms, cells use calcium signaling to carry information from the…

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…

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…

Biological cells encode information about their environment through biochemical signaling networks that control their internal state and response. This information is often encoded in the dynamical patterns of the signaling molecules,…

Cells use biochemical networks to translate environmental information into intracellular responses. These responses can be highly dynamic, but how the information is encoded in these dynamics remains poorly understood. Here we investigate…

Intercellular signaling has an important role in organism development, but not all communication occurs using the same mechanism. Here, we analyze the energy efficiency of intercellular signaling by two canonical mechanisms: diffusion of…

Signaling pathways are responsible for the regulation of cell processes, such as monitoring the external environment, transmitting information across membranes, and making cell fate decisions. Given the increasing amount of biological data…

The ability of cells to sense and respond to the mechanical properties of their environments is fundamental to a range of cellular behaviours, with substrate stiffness increasingly being found to be a key signalling factor. Although active…

We study the dynamics of intracellular calcium oscillations in the presence of proteins that bind calcium on multiple sites and that are generally believed to act as passive calcium buffers in cells. We find that multisite calcium-binding…

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…

Cells are constantly exposed to fluctuating environmental conditions. External signals are sensed, processed and integrated by cellular signal transduction networks, which translate input signals into specific cellular responses by means of…

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…

Many biological, physical, and social interactions have a particular dependence on where they take place. In living cells, protein movement between the nucleus and cytoplasm affects cellular response (i.e., proteins must be present in the…

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…

Phosphorelays are a class of signaling mechanisms used by cells to respond to changes in their environment. Phosphorelays (of which two-component systems constitute a special case) are particularly abundant in prokaryotes and have been…

Bacterial second messengers are crucial for transmitting environmental information to cellular responses. However, quantifying their information transmission capacity remains challenging. Here, we engineer an isolated cAMP signaling channel…

Cells receive signaling molecules by receptors and relay information via sensory networks so that they can respond properly depending on the type of signal. Recent studies have shown that cells can extract multi-dimensional information from…

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…

Sensors are the first element of the pathways that control the response of cells to their environment. After chemical, the next most important cue is mechanical, and protein complexes that produce or enable a chemical signal in response to…