Related papers: Physical limit to concentration sensing in a chang…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Biological sensory systems generally operate out of equilibrium, which often leads to their improved performance. Here, we study the sensitivity of ligand concentration for a general receptor model, which is generally in the non-equilibrium…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The physical limit with which a cell senses external ligand concentration corresponds to the perfect absorber, where all ligand particles are absorbed and overcounting of same ligand particles does not occur. Here we analyze how the lateral…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The precision of concentration sensing is improved when cells communicate. Here we derive the physical limits to concentration sensing for cells that communicate over short distances by directly exchanging small molecules (juxtacrine…
Spatial information from cell-surface receptors is crucial for processes that require signal processing and sensing of the environment. Here, we investigate the optimal placement of such receptors through a theoretical model that minimizes…
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…
Physical limit of molecular sensing has been extensively studied in biological systems. Biosensors are engineered equivalents of molecular sensors in living systems and play critical role in disease diagnosis and management. Investigation…