Related papers: Ligand-concentration sensitivity of a multi-state …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
We combine stochastic thermodynamics, large deviation theory, and information theory to derive fundamental limits on the accuracy with which single cell receptors can estimate external concentrations. As expected, if estimation is performed…
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…
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…
Cells respond to chemical cues, and the precision with which they can sense these cues is fundamentally limited by the stochastic nature of diffusion and ligand binding. Berg and Purcell famously investigated how well a small sensor in an…
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…
Cells estimate concentrations of chemical ligands in their environment using a limited set of receptors. Recent work has shown that the temporal sequence of binding and unbinding events on just a single receptor can be used to estimate the…
A diffusion-based molecular communication system has two major components: the diffusion in the medium, and the ligand-reception. Information bits, encoded in the time variations of the concentration of molecules, are conveyed to the…
Cells need to reliably sense external ligand concentrations to achieve various biological functions such as chemotaxis or signaling. The molecular recognition of ligands by surface receptors is degenerate in many systems leading to…
Specific interactions between receptors and their target ligands in the presence of non-target ligands are crucial for biological processes such as T cell ligand discrimination. To discriminate between the target and non-target ligands,…
In this article, we study the kinetics of reversible ligand binding to receptors on a spherical cell surface using a self-consistent stochastic theory. Binding, dissociation, diffusion and rebinding of ligands are incorporated into the…
The phenomenon of molecular binding, where two molecules, referred to as a receptor and a ligand, bind together to form a ligand-receptor complex, is ubiquitous in biology and essential for the accurate functioning of all life-sustaining…
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…
We introduce a derangement model of ligand-receptor binding that allows us to quantitatively frame the question "How can ligands seek out and bind to their optimal receptor sites in a sea of other competing ligands and suboptimal receptor…
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…