Related papers: Physical limit to concentration sensing in a chang…
Eukaryotic cells generally sense chemical gradients using the binding of chemical ligands to membrane receptors. In order to perform chemotaxis effectively in different environments, cells need to adapt to different concentrations. We…
When cells measure concentrations of chemical signals, they may average multiple measurements over time in order to reduce noise in their measurements. However, when cells are in a environment that changes over time, past measurements may…
Living cells deploy many resources to sense their environments, including receptors, downstream signaling molecules, time and fuel. However, it is not known which resources fundamentally limit the precision of sensing, like weak links in a…
Cells continuously probe their environment with membrane receptors, achieving subsecond adaptation of their behaviour [1-3]. Recently, several receptors, including cadherins, were found to bind ligands with a lifetime of order of one…
This paper demonstrates fundamental limits of sensor networks for detection problems where the number of hypotheses is exponentially large. Such problems characterize many important applications including detection and classification of…
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…
Living cells often need to measure chemical concentrations that vary in time. To this end, they deploy many resources, e.g. receptors, downstream signaling molecules, time and energy. Here, we present a theory for the optimal design of a…
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.…
In biological cells and novel diagnostic devices biochemical receptors need to be sensitive to extremely small concentration changes of signaling molecules. The accuracy of such molecular signaling is ultimately limited by the counting…
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…
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…
Position determination in biological systems is often achieved through protein concentration gradients. Measuring the local concentration of such a protein with a spatially-varying distribution allows the measurement of position within the…
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…
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…
Artificially engineered biosensors are highly inefficient in accurately measuring the concentration of biomarkers, particularly, during early diagnosis of diseases. On the other hand, single cellular systems such as chemotactic bacteria can…
To successfully navigate chemical gradients, microorganisms need to predict how the ligand concentration changes in space. Due to their limited size, they do not take a spatial derivative over their body length but rather a temporal…
Metastatic cancer cells detect the direction of lymphatic flow by self-communication: they secrete and detect a chemical which, due to the flow, returns to the cell surface anisotropically. The secretion rate is low, meaning detection noise…
When a single cell senses a chemical gradient and chemotaxes, stochastic receptor-ligand binding can be a fundamental limit to the cell's accuracy. For clusters of cells responding to gradients, however, there is a critical difference: even…
Cells in natural environments like tissue or soil sense and respond to extracellular ligands with intricately structured and non-monotonic spatial distributions that are sculpted by processes such as fluid flow and substrate adhesion.…
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…