Related papers: Limitations to Chemotactic Concentration Sensing d…
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…
Collective cell migration in response to a chemical cue occurs in many biological processes such as morphogenesis and cancer metastasis. Clusters of migratory cells in these systems are capable of responding to gradients of less than 1%…
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…
Glutamate and glycine are important neurotransmitters in the brain. An action potential prop- agating in the terminal of a presynatic neuron causes the release of glutamate and glycine in the synapse by vesicles fusing with the cell…
Organisms use specialized sensors to measure their environments, but the fundamental principles that determine their accuracy remain largely unknown. In Escherichia coli chemotaxis, we previously found that gradient-climbing speed is…
Biological cells sense external chemical stimuli in their environment using cell-surface receptors. To increase the sensitivity of sensing, receptors often cluster, most noticeably in bacterial chemotaxis, a paradigm for signaling and…
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…
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…
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…
Biological systems sense and extract information from fluctuating signals while operating under energetic constraints and limited resolution. We introduce a general chemical model in which a sensor, coupled to a signaling pathway activated…
Ca$^{2+}$ plays an important role in cell signal transduction. Its intracellular propagation is the most basic process of Ca$^{2+}$ signaling, such as calcium wave and double messenger system. In this work, with both numerical simulation…
Adaptation of the chemotaxis sensory pathway of the bacterium Escherichia coli is integral for detecting chemicals over a wide range of background concentrations, ultimately allowing cells to swim towards sources of attractant and away from…
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…
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…
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…
Feedback in sensory biochemical networks can give rise to bifurcations in cells' behavioral response. These bifurcations share many properties with thermodynamic critical points. Evidence suggests that biological systems may operate near…
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…
Bacterial chemotactic sensing converts noisy chemical signals into running and tumbling. We analyze the static sensing limits of mixed Tar/Tsr chemoreceptor clusters in individual Escherichia coli cells using a heterogeneous…
Biochemical reaction networks in living cells usually involve reversible covalent modification of signaling molecules, such as protein phosphorylation. Under conditions of small molecule numbers, as is frequently the case in living cells,…