Related papers: Tradeoffs in concentration sensing in dynamic envi…
Bacterial processes ranging from gene expression to motility and biofilm formation are constantly challenged by internal and external noise. While the importance of stochastic fluctuations has been appreciated for chemotaxis, it is…
Cells maintain a stable size as they grow and divide. Inspired by the available experimental data, most proposed models for size homeostasis assume size control mechanisms that act on a timescale of one generation. Such mechanisms lead to…
Stochastic fluctuations of molecular abundances are a ubiquitous feature of cellular processes and lead to significant cell-to-cell variability. Recent theoretical work established lower bounds for stochastic fluctuations in cells for broad…
Cellular biology exists embedded in a world dominated by random dynamics and chance. Many vital molecules and pieces of cellular machinery diffuse within cells, moving along random trajectories as they collide with the other biomolecular…
Fractional killing in response to drugs is a hallmark of non-genetic cellular heterogeneity. Yet how individual lineages evade drug treatment, as observed in bacteria and cancer cells, is not quantitatively understood. We analyse a…
Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…
In complex ecosystems such as microbial communities, there is constant ecological and evolutionary feedback between the residing species and the environment occurring on concurrent timescales. Species respond and adapt to their surroundings…
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…
The cellular milieu is teeming with biochemical nano-machines whose activity is a strong source of correlated non-thermal fluctuations termed active noise. Essential elements of this circuitry are enzymes, catalysts that speed up the rate…
We explore the ability of a qubit probe to characterize unknown parameters of its environment. By resorting to quantum estimation theory, we analytically find the ultimate bound on the precision of estimating key parameters of a broad class…
Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC) typically considers noise only in the process model, i.e. unknown disturbances. However, in many robotic applications involving interaction with the environment, such as locomotion and manipulation,…
In contexts ranging from embryonic development to bacterial ecology, cell populations migrate chemotactically along self-generated chemical gradients, often forming a propagating front. Here, we theoretically show that the stability of such…
Living cells sense noisy biochemical signals crucial for survival, yet models incorporating intracellular signaling are limited. This study examines how cells sense chemotactic concentrations through phosphorylation readouts in Ca2+…
One major challenge for living cells is the measurement and prediction of signals corrupted by noise. In general, cells need to make decisions based on their compressed representation of noisy, time-varying signals. Strategies for signal…
This paper considers a sequential estimation and sensor scheduling problem with one sensor and one estimator. The sensor makes sequential observations about the state of an underlying memoryless stochastic process, and makes a decision as…
Collective cell migration in response to a chemical cue occurs in many biological processes such as morphogenesis and cancer metastasis. Clusters of migratory cells in these systems are capable of responding to gradients of less than 1%…
Many cellular components are present in such low numbers that individual stochastic production and degradation events lead to significant fluctuations in molecular abundances. Although feedback control can, in principle, suppress such…
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…
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…
The mammalian brain is a metabolically expensive device, and evolutionary pressures have presumably driven it to make productive use of its resources. For sensory areas, this concept has been expressed more formally as an optimality…