Related papers: Tradeoffs in concentration sensing in dynamic envi…

This paper investigates the impact of control field noise on the optimal manipulation of quantum dynamics. Simulations are performed on several multilevel quantum systems with the goal of population transfer in the presence of significant…

Stochasticity is both exploited and controlled by cells. Although the intrinsic stochasticity inherent in biochemistry is relatively well understood, cellular variation, or 'noise', is predominantly generated by interactions of the system…

Cell decision-making refers to the process by which cells gather information from their local microenvironment and regulate their internal states to create appropriate responses. Microenvironmental cell sensing plays a key role in this…

In this paper we statistically characterise the bio-aerosol background in an urban environment. To do this we measure concentration levels of naturally occurring microbiological material in the atmosphere over a two month period. Naturally…

Bacterial sensor systems can be used for the detection and measurement of molecular signal concentrations. The dynamics of the sensor directly depend on the biological properties of the bacterial sensor cells; manipulation of these features…

Nature is in constant flux, so animals must account for changes in their environment when making decisions. How animals learn the timescale of such changes and adapt their decision strategies accordingly is not well understood. Recent…

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…

It has been generally recognized that stochasticity can play an important role in the information processing accomplished by reaction networks in biological cells. Most treatments of that stochasticity employ Gaussian noise even though it…

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 systems display impressive capabilities in effectively responding to environmental signals in real time. There is increasing evidence that organisms may indeed be employing near optimal Bayesian calculations in their…

Biological systems sense and extract information from fluctuating signals while operating under energetic constraints and limited resolution. We introduce a general chemical model in which a sensor, coupled to a signaling pathway activated…

Cells constantly need to monitor the state of the environment to detect changes and timely respond. The detection of concentration changes of a ligand by a set of receptors can be cast as a problem of hypothesis testing, and the cell viewed…

In this thesis we aim to analyze and quantify the energetic and information contents that can be extracted from a dynamical system subject to the external environment. The latter is usually assumed to be deleterious for the feasibility of…

Bacteria meticulously regulate their intracellular ion concentrations and create ionic concentration gradients across the bacterial membrane. These ionic concentration gradients provide free energy for many cellular processes and are…

Adaptation to changing environments is a universal feature of life and can involve the organism modifying itself in response to the environment as well as actively modifying the environment to control selection pressures. The latter case…

Cells control their size to cope with noise during growth and division. Eukaryotic cells exhibiting "sizer" control (targeting a specific size before dividing) may rely on molecular concentration thresholds, but simple implementations of…

Cooperative interactions among the binding of multiple signaling molecules is a common mechanism for enhancing the sensitivity of biological signaling systems. It is widely assumed that this increase in sensitivity of the mean response…

Navigating toward a known target in a noisy environment is a fundamental problem shared across biological, physical, and engineered systems. Although optimal strategies are often framed in terms of continuous, fine-grained feedback, we show…

Small chemical sensors are subjected to adsorption-desorption fluctuations which usually considered as noise contaminating useful signal. Based on temporal properties of this noise, it is shown that it can be made useful if proper…

Cooperative interactions among sensory receptors provide a general mechanism to increase the sensitivity of signal transduction. In particular, bacterial chemotaxis receptors interact cooperatively to produce an ultrasensitive response to…