Related papers: Chemotaxing E. coli do not count single molecules
In nature, microorganisms must often cope with hostile environmental conditions. To do so they have developed sophisticated cooperative behavior and intricate communication capabilities, such as: direct cell-cell physical interactions via…
Bacterial contamination of biological conducts, catheters or water resources is a major threat to public health and can be amplified by the ability of bacteria to swim upstream. The mechanisms of this rheotaxis, the reorientation with…
Cells use surface receptors to estimate the concentration of external ligands. Limits on the accuracy of such estimations have been well studied for pairs of ligand and receptor species. However, the environment typically contains many…
Clinical biosensors with low detection limit hold significant promise in the early diagnosis of debilitating diseases. Recent progress in sensor development has led to the demonstration of detection capable of detecting target molecules…
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…
Escherichia coli is a motile bacterium that moves up a chemoattractant gradient by performing a biased random walk composed of alternating runs and tumbles. This paper presents calculations of the chemotactic drift velocity vd (the mean…
In recent years it is increasingly being recognized that biochemical signals are not necessarily constant in time and that the temporal dynamics of a signal can be the information carrier. Moreover, it is now well established that…
Biological organisms are simple at heart: cells, their basic units, perform a variety of behaviors by expressing proteins from DNA-encoded genes. Gene expression though depends on sets of often-convoluted regulatory interactions known as…
The deep connection between thermodynamics, computation, and information is now well established both theoretically and experimentally. Here, we extend these ideas to show that thermodynamics also places fundamental constraints on…
Our understanding of cell division control in bacteria still relies largely on interpreting correlations between phenomenological variables, with limited connection to the underlying molecular mechanisms. Here, we analytically solve a…
In this paper, we apply dimensional analysis to study a diffusive molecular communication system that uses diffusing enzymes in the propagation environment to mitigate intersymbol interference. The enzymes bind to information molecules and…
Biological information processing as implemented by regulatory and signaling networks in living cells requires sufficient specificity of molecular interaction to distinguish signals from one another, but much of regulation and signaling…
Rapid detection of bacterial growth is crucial in clinical, food safety, and environmental contexts, yet conventional optical methods are limited by noise and require hours of incubation. Here, we present the first experimental…
Cells use signalling pathways as windows into the environment to gather information, transduce it into their interior, and use it to drive behaviours. MAPK (ERK) is a highly conserved signalling pathway in eukaryotes, directing multiple…
The Escherichia coli chemotaxis signaling pathway has served as a model system for studying the adaptive sensing of environmental signals by large protein complexes. The chemoreceptors control the kinase activity of CheA in response to the…
The Keller-Segel system has been widely proposed as a model for bacterial waves driven by chemotactic processes. Current experiments on {\em E. coli} have shown precise structure of traveling pulses. We present here an alternative…
Chemotaxis, the directional locomotion of cells towards a source of a chemical gradient, is an integral part of many biological processes - for example, bacteria motion, single-cell or multicellular organisms development, immune response,…
Cells adapt to changing environments by sensing ligand concentrations using specific receptors. The accuracy of sensing is ultimately limited by the finite number of ligand molecules bound by receptors. Previously derived physical limits to…
Bacterial migration through confined spaces is critical for several phenomena like: biofilm formation, bacterial transport in soils, and bacterial therapy against cancer . In the present work, \textit{E. coli} (strain K12-MG1655 WT)…
Complex biological systems are very robust to genetic and environmental changes at all levels of organization. Many biological functions of Escherichia coli metabolism can be sustained against single-gene or even multiple-gene mutations by…