Related papers: Physical limits on chemical sensing in bounded dom…
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…
How cells reliably infer information about their environment is a fundamentally important question. While sensing and signaling generally start with cell-surface receptors, the degree of accuracy with which a cell can measure external…
Microorganisms like bacteria can sense concentration of chemo-attractants in its medium very accurately. They achieve this through interaction between the receptors on their cell surface and the chemo-attractant molecules (like sugar). But…
To adapt their behaviour in changing environments, cells sense concentrations by binding external ligands to their receptors. However, incorrect ligands may bind nonspecifically to receptors, and when their concentration is large, this…
This work reports on two results. At first we revisit the Berg and Purcell calculation that provides a lower bound to the error in concentration measurement by cells, by considering the realistic case when the cell starts measuring the…
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…
Physical limit of molecular sensing has been extensively studied in biological systems. Biosensors are engineered equivalents of molecular sensors in living systems and play critical role in disease diagnosis and management. Investigation…
Biological cells are able to accurately sense chemicals with receptors at their surfaces, allowing cells to move towards sources of attractant and away from sources of repellent. The accuracy of sensing chemical concentration is ultimately…
Accurate sensing of chemical concentrations is essential for numerous biological processes. The accuracy of this sensing, for small numbers of molecules, is limited by shot noise. Corresponding theoretical limits on sensing precision, as a…
This paper demonstrates fundamental limits of sensor networks for detection problems where the number of hypotheses is exponentially large. Such problems characterize many important applications including detection and classification of…
Many types of cells can sense external ligand concentrations with cell-surface receptors at extremely high accuracy. Interestingly, ligand-bound receptors are often internalized, a process also known as receptor-mediated endocytosis. While…
Artificially engineered biosensors are highly inefficient in accurately measuring the concentration of biomarkers, particularly, during early diagnosis of diseases. On the other hand, single cellular systems such as chemotactic bacteria can…
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…
The precision of concentration sensing is improved when cells communicate. Here we derive the physical limits to concentration sensing for cells that communicate over short distances by directly exchanging small molecules (juxtacrine…
Constitutive relations describe how materials respond to external stimuli such as forces. All materials respond heterogeneously at small scales, which limits what a localized sensor can discern about the global constitution of a material.…
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…
Biological sensory systems generally operate out of equilibrium, which often leads to their improved performance. Here, we study the sensitivity of ligand concentration for a general receptor model, which is generally in the non-equilibrium…
Despite tremendous potential of highly sensitive electronic detection of bio-molecules by nanoscale biosensors for genomics and proteomic applications, many aspects of experimentally observed sensor response (S) are unexplained within…
The physical limit with which a cell senses external ligand concentration corresponds to the perfect absorber, where all ligand particles are absorbed and overcounting of same ligand particles does not occur. Here we analyze how the lateral…
Autologous chemotaxis, in which cells secrete and detect molecules to determine the direction of fluid flow, is thwarted at high cell density because molecules from other cells interfere with a given cell's signal. Using a minimal model of…