Related papers: Physical limits on chemical sensing in bounded dom…
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…
Many crucial biological processes operate with surprisingly small numbers of molecules, and there is renewed interest in analyzing the impact of noise associated with these small numbers. Twenty--five years ago, Berg and Purcell showed that…
Chemotactic cells of eukaryotic organisms are able to accurately sense shallow chemical concentration gradients using cell-surface receptors. This sensing ability is remarkable as cells must be able to spatially resolve small fractional…
Most sensory cells use cross-membrane chemoreceptors to detect chemical signals in the environment. The biochemical properties and spatial organization of chemoreceptors play important roles in achieving and maintaining sensitivity and…
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…
We consider a chemotaxis-fluid system involving nonlinear cell diffusion of porous medium type, signal consumption by cells, and rather general, possibly matrix-valued, chemotactic sensitivities. It is shown that if the corresponding…
We consider processes that coincide with a given diffusion process except on the boundaries of a finite collection of domains. The behavior on each of the boundaries is asymmetric: the process is much more likely to enter the interior of…
In this work, we investigate precision limitations in spectrophotometry (i.e., spectroscopic concentration measurements) imposed by chemical processes of molecules. Using the recently developed Photon-resolved Floquet theory, which…
Membrane curvature sensing is essential for a diverse range of biological processes. Recent experiments have revealed that a single nanometer-sized septin protein can distinguish between membrane-coated glass beads of one micron and three…
Cells sense and predict their environment via energy-dissipating pathways. However, it is unclear whether dissipation helps or harms prediction. Here we study dissipation and prediction for a minimal sensory module of receptors that…
Many chemotactic bacteria inhabit environments in which chemicals appear as localized pulses and evolve by processes such as diffusion and mixing. We show that, in such environments, physical limits on the accuracy of temporal gradient…
Gradient sensing requires at least two measurements at different points in space. These measurements must then be communicated to a common location to be compared, which is unavoidably noisy. While much is known about the limits of…
Many types of cells are able to accurately sense shallow gradients of chemicals across their diameters, allowing the cells to move towards or away from chemical sources. This chemotactic ability relies on the remarkable capacity of cells to…
Biomolecular condensates form on timescales of seconds in cells upon environmental or compositional changes. Condensate formation is thus argued to act as a mechanism for sensing such changes and quickly initiating downstream processes,…
We study a chemotaxis-consumption mechanism, in which some chemical signal and cells density interact each other. In order to control the concentration of such a population, sources involving gradient nonlinearities, which introduce a…
Biological cells are often found to sense their chemical environment near the single-molecule detection limit. Surprisingly, this precision is higher than simple estimates of the fundamental physical limit, hinting towards active sensing…
Biological cells estimate concentration gradients of signaling molecules with a precision that is limited not only by sensing noise, but additionally by the cell's own stochastic motion. We ask for the theoretical limits of gradient…
Metastatic cancer cells detect the direction of lymphatic flow by self-communication: they secrete and detect a chemical which, due to the flow, returns to the cell surface anisotropically. The secretion rate is low, meaning detection noise…
Temperature sensing is a ubiquitous cell behavior, but the fundamental limits to the precision of temperature sensing are poorly understood. Unlike in chemical concentration sensing, the precision of temperature sensing is not limited by…
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…