Related papers: Predicting concentration changes via discrete samp…
Adaptation of the chemotaxis sensory pathway of the bacterium Escherichia coli is integral for detecting chemicals over a wide range of background concentrations, ultimately allowing cells to swim towards sources of attractant and away from…
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…
The bacterium Escherichia coli (E. coli) moves in its natural environment in a series of straight runs, interrupted by tumbles which cause change of direction. It performs chemotaxis towards chemo-attractants by extending the duration of…
Two distinct mechanisms for filtering noise in an input signal are identified in a class of adaptive sensory networks. We find that the high frequency noise is filtered by the output degradation process through time-averaging; while the low…
We investigate the boundary between chemotaxis driven by spatial estimation of gradients and chemotaxis driven by temporal estimation. While it is well known that spatial chemotaxis becomes disadvantageous for small organisms at high noise…
Living cells can enhance their fitness by anticipating environmental change. We study how accurately linear signaling networks in cells can predict future signals. We find that maximal predictive power results from a combination of…
Robustness and sensitivity of responses generated by cell signaling networks has been associated with survival and evolvability of organisms. However, existing methods analyzing robustness and sensitivity of signaling networks ignore the…
In many sensory systems, transmembrane receptors are spatially organized in large clusters. Such arrangement may facilitate signal amplification and the integration of multiple stimuli. However, this organization likely also affects the…
Organisms use specialized sensors to measure their environments, but the fundamental principles that determine their accuracy remain largely unknown. In Escherichia coli chemotaxis, we previously found that gradient-climbing speed is…
Organisms must acquire and use environmental information to guide their behaviors. However, it is unclear whether and how information quantitatively limits behavioral performance. Here, we relate information to behavioral performance in…
Bacterial chemotactic sensing converts noisy chemical signals into running and tumbling. We analyze the static sensing limits of mixed Tar/Tsr chemoreceptor clusters in individual Escherichia coli cells using a heterogeneous…
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…
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…
The chemotactic network of Escherichia coli has been studied extensively both biophysically and information-theoretically. Nevertheless, the connection between these two aspects is still elusive. In this work, we report such a connection by…
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 can leverage correlations in environmental fluctuations to predict the future environment and mount a response ahead of time. To this end, cells need to encode the past signal into the output of the intracellular network from…
Bacteria can adjust their swimming behaviour in response to chemical variations, a phenomenon known as chemotaxis. This process is characterised by a drift velocity that depends non-linearly on the concentration of chemical species and its…
Biological systems like ciliated microorganisms are capable to respond to the external chemical gradients, a process known as chemotaxis which has been studied here using the chiral squirmer model. This theoretical model considers the…
Most of our understanding of bacterial chemotaxis comes from studies of Escherichia coli. However, recent evidence suggests significant departures from the E. coli paradigm in other bacterial species. This variation may stem from different…
Chemotaxis of the bacterium Escherichia coli is well understood in shallow chemical gradients, but its swimming behavior remains difficult to interpret in steep gradients. By focusing on single-cell trajectories from simulations, we…