Related papers: Multicellular sensing at a feedback-induced critic…

Near a bifurcation point, the response time of a system is expected to diverge due to the phenomenon of critical slowing down. We investigate critical slowing down in well-mixed stochastic models of biochemical feedback by exploiting a…

We present and analyse a model for cell signalling processes in biological tissues. The model includes diffusion and nonlinear reactions on the cell surfaces, and both inter- and intracellular signalling. Using techniques from the theory of…

Cooperative technology is expected to have a great impact on the performance of cellular or, more generally, infrastructure networks. Both multicell processing (cooperation among base stations) and relaying (cooperation at the user level)…

Molecular communication between biological entities is a new paradigm in communications. Recently, we studied molecular communication between two nodes formed from synthetic bacteria. Due to high randomness in behavior of bacteria, we used…

Inputs to signaling pathways can have complex statistics that depend on the environment and on the behavioral response to previous stimuli. Such behavioral feedback is particularly important in navigation. Successful navigation relies on…

In a molecular communication network, transmitters and receivers communicate by using signalling molecules. At the receivers, the signalling molecules react, via a chain of chemical reactions, to produce output molecules. The counts of…

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…

Biochemical reaction networks in living cells usually involve reversible covalent modification of signaling molecules, such as protein phosphorylation. Under conditions of small molecule numbers, as is frequently the case in living cells,…

Living cells use readout molecules to record the state of receptor proteins, similar to measurements or copies in typical computational devices. But is this analogy rigorous? Can cells be optimally efficient, and if not, why? We show that,…

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…

Living systems, particularly multicellular systems, often seem hopelessly complex. But recent studies have suggested that beneath this complexity, there may be unifying quantitative principles that we are only now starting to unravel. All…

Molecular signalling in living cells occurs at low copy numbers and is thereby inherently limited by the noise imposed by thermal diffusion. The precision at which biochemical receptors can count signalling molecules is intimately related…

We describe a mechanism for pronounced biochemical oscillations, relevant to microscopic systems, such as the intracellular environment. This mechanism operates for reaction schemes which, when modeled using deterministic rate equations,…

Cells are often considered input-output devices that maximize the transmission of information by converting extracellular stimuli (input) via signaling pathways (communication channel) to cell behavior (output). However, in biological…

Bistability is ubiquitous in biological systems. For example, bistability is found in many reaction networks that involve the control and execution of important biological functions, such as signalling processes. Positive feedback loops,…

Cellular decision making is based on regulatory circuits that associate signal thresholds to specific physiological actions. This transmission of information is subjected to molecular noise what can decrease its fidelity. Here, we show…

Bacteria track chemical gradients using a biased random walk, a process called chemotaxis. Experiments suggest that bacteria also communicate during this process. Using a mathematical model, we find that sufficiently strong communication…

Recent experiments have indicated that many biological systems self-organise near their critical point, which hints at a common design principle. While it has been suggested that information transmission is optimized near the critical…

Directional chemosensing is ubiquitous in cell biology, but some cells such as mating yeast paradoxically degrade the signal they aim to detect. While the data processing inequality suggests that such signal modification cannot increase the…

The molecular network in an organism consists of transcription/translation regulation, protein-protein interactions/modifications and a metabolic network, together forming a system that allows the cell to respond sensibly to the multiple…