Related papers: Chemotaxing E. coli do not count single molecules
After application of a step stimulus, in the form of a sudden change in attractant environment, the receptor activity and tumbling bias of an {\sl E. coli} cell change sharply to reach their extremal values before they gradually relax to…
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…
Biological information processing is generally assumed to be classical. Measured cellular energy budgets of both prokaryotes and eukaryotes, however, fall orders of magnitude short of the power required to maintain classical states of…
We propose a biophysical model of Escherichia coli that predicts growth rate and an effective cellular composition from an effective, coarse-grained representation of its genome. We assume that E. coli is in a state of balanced exponential…
In recent years experiments have demonstrated that living cells can measure low chemical concentrations with high precision, and much progress has been made in understanding what sets the fundamental limit to the precision of chemical…
Various microorganisms and some mammalian cells are able to swim in viscous fluids by performing nonreciprocal body deformations, such as rotating attached flagella or by distorting their entire body. In order to perform chemotaxis, i.e. to…
{\sl Escherichia coli} ({\sl E. coli}) bacteria govern their trajectories by switching between running and tumbling modes as a function of the nutrient concentration they experienced in the past. At short time one observes a drift of the…
Cells use biochemical networks to translate environmental information into intracellular responses. These responses can be highly dynamic, but how the information is encoded in these dynamics remains poorly understood. Here we investigate…
Chemotaxis is the physical phenomenon that bacteria adjust their motions according to chemical stimulus. A classical model for this phenomenon is a kinetic equation that describes the velocity jump process whose tumbling/transition kernel…
To survive in ever-changing environments, living organisms need to continuously combine the ongoing external inputs they receive, representing present conditions, with their dynamical internal state, which includes influences of past…
Escherichia coli has long been a trusty companion, maintaining health in our guts and advancing biological knowledge in the laboratory. In light of recent findings, we discuss multicellular self-organization in E. coli and develop general…
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…
Biomolecules stochastically occupy different possible configurations with probabilities given by non-equilibrium steady-state distributions. These distributions are determined by the transition rate constants between different…
In this paper the first equation within a class of well known chemotaxis systems is derived as a hydrodynamic limit from a stochastic interacting many particle system on the lattice. The cells are assumed to interact with attractive…
Which properties of metabolic networks can be derived solely from stoichiometric information about the network's constituent reactions? Predictive results have been obtained by Flux Balance Analysis (FBA), by postulating that cells set…
Chemical signaling is one of the ubiquitous mechanisms by which inter-cellular communication takes place at the microscopic level, particularly via chemotaxis. Such multi-cellular systems are popularly studied using continuum, mean-field…
Intracellular transmission of information via chemical and transcriptional networks is thwarted by a physical limitation: the finite copy number of the constituent chemical species introduces unavoidable intrinsic noise. Here we provide a…
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…
One striking feature of bacterial motion is their ability to swim upstream along corners and crevices, by leveraging hydrodynamic interactions. This motion through anatomic ducts or medical devices might be at the origin of serious…
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…