Related papers: Single cells can resolve graded stimuli
Central to the functioning of a living cell is its ability to control the readout or expression of information encoded in the genome. In many cases, a single transcription factor protein activates or represses the expression of many genes.…
Comparisons of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data across species can reveal links between cellular gene expression and the evolution of cell functions, features, and phenotypes. These comparisons invoke evolutionary histories, as…
The nervous system represents time-dependent signals in sequences of discrete action potentials or spikes, all spikes are identical so that information is carried only in the spike arrival times. We show how to quantify this information, in…
Living cells sense their environment through the binding of extra-cellular molecular ligands to cell surface receptors. Puzzlingly, vast numbers of signaling pathways exhibit a high degree of cross talk between different signals whereby…
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…
Many biological, physical, and social interactions have a particular dependence on where they take place. In living cells, protein movement between the nucleus and cytoplasm affects cellular response (i.e., proteins must be present in the…
Spikes are the currency in central nervous systems for information transmission and processing. They are also believed to play an essential role in low-power consumption of the biological systems, whose efficiency attracts increasing…
Recordings in the human medial temporal lobe have found many neurons that respond to pictures (and related stimuli) of just one particular person out of those presented. It has been proposed that these are concept cells, responding to just…
During development, spatio-temporal patterns ranging from checkerboard to engulfing occur with precise proportions of the respective cell fates. Key developmental regulators are intracellular transcriptional interactions and intercellular…
Codifying memories is one of the fundamental problems of modern Neuroscience. The functional mechanisms behind this phenomenon remain largely unknown. Experimental evidence suggests that some of the memory functions are performed by…
In multicellular organisms, cells coordinate their activities through cell-cell communication (CCC), which is crucial for development, tissue homeostasis, and disease progression. Recent advances in single-cell and spatial omics…
A major obstacle in analyzing the evolution of information exchange and processing is our insufficient understanding of the underlying signaling and decision-making biological mechanisms. For instance, it is unclear why are humans unique in…
Mammalian spatial navigation relies on specialized neurons, such as place and grid cells, which encode position based on self-motion and environmental cues. While extensive research has explored the computational role of grid cells, the…
Molecular Communications (MC) is a bio-inspired communication technique that uses molecules to encode and transfer information. Many efforts have been focused on developing new modulation techniques for MC by exploiting distinguishable…
Migrating cells possess intracellular gradients of Rho GTPases, but it is unknown whether these shallow gradients themselves can induce motility. Here we describe a new method to present cells with induced linear gradients of active,…
In multicellular systems, the single-cell behaviors should be coordinated consistently with the overall population dynamics and functions. However, the interrelation between single-cell rules and the population-level goal is still elusive.…
A large number of eukaryotic cells are able to directly detect external chemical gradients with great accuracy and the ultimate limit to their sensitivity has been a topic of debate for many years. Previous work has been done to understand…
Single-cell RNA-seq data allow the quantification of cell type differences across a growing set of biological contexts. However, pinpointing a small subset of genomic features explaining this variability can be ill-defined and…
Control of the cytoskeleton and mechanical contacts with the extracellular environment are essential component of motility in eukaryotic cells. In the absence of signals, cells continuously rebuild the cytoskeleton and periodically extend…
The hippocampus supports spatial navigation by encoding cognitive maps through collective place cell activity. We model the place cell population as non-negative spatial embeddings derived from the spectral decomposition of multi-step…