Related papers: Gradient Sensing via Cell Communication

Gradient sensing requires at least two measurements at different points in space. These measurements must then be communicated to a common location to be compared, which is unavoidably noisy. While much is known about the limits of…

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…

Eukaryotic cells respond to a chemoattractant gradient by forming intracellular gradients of signaling molecules that reflect the extracellular chemical gradient - an ability called directional sensing. Quantitative experiments have…

Gradient sensing underlies important biological processes including morphogenesis, polarization, and cell migration. The precision of gradient sensing increases with the length of a detector (a cell or group of cells) in the gradient…

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…

Many eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells can exhibit remarkable sensing ability under small gradient of chemical compound. In this study, we approach this phenomenon by considering the contribution of multiple ligands to the chemical kinetics…

Sensory systems have evolved to respond to input stimuli of certain statistical properties, and to reliably transmit this information through biochemical pathways. Hence, for an experimentally well-characterized sensory system, one ought to…

Cells are constantly exposed to diverse stimuli-chemical, mechanical, or electrical-that guide their movement. In physiological conditions, these signals often overlap, as seen during infections, where neutrophils and dendritic cells…

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…

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…

Eukaryotic cells perform chemotaxis by determining the direction of chemical gradients based on stochastic sensing of concentrations at the cell surface. To examine the efficiency of this process, previous studies have investigated the…

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…

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…

In recent years experiments have demonstrated that living cells can measure low chemical concentrations with high precision, and much progress has been made in understanding what sets the fundamental limit to the precision of chemical…

Self-generated gradients (SGG) provide robust steering cues that guide cells in their long-distance expeditions during embryonic development, immune response, and cancer metastasis. Cells generate their own local, dynamic gradients by…

Biological cells estimate concentration gradients of signaling molecules with a precision that is limited not only by sensing noise, but additionally by the cell's own stochastic motion. We ask for the theoretical limits of gradient…

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…

Cells measure concentrations of external ligands by capturing ligand molecules with cell surface receptors. The numbers of molecules captured by different receptors co-vary because they depend on the same extrinsic ligand fluctuations.…

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…