Related papers: Limitations to Chemotactic Concentration Sensing d…
Chemotaxis is the process by which cells behave in a way that follows the chemical gradient. Applications to bacteria growth, tissue inflammation, and vascular tumors provide a focus on optimization strategies. Experiments can characterize…
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…
Unicellular organisms are open metabolic systems that need to process information about their external environment in order to survive. In most types of tissues and organisms, cells use calcium signaling to carry information from the…
Many eukaryotic cells are able to perform directional mechanosensing by directly measuring minute spatial differences in the mechanical stress on their membranes. Here, we explore the limits of a single mechanosensitive channel activation…
In this paper we show that living cells can multiplex biochemical signals, i.e. transmit multiple signals through the same signaling pathway simultaneously, and yet respond to them very specifically. We demonstrate how two binary input…
We describe a mechanism for pronounced biochemical oscillations, relevant to microscopic systems, such as the intracellular environment. This mechanism operates for reaction schemes which, when modeled using deterministic rate equations,…
The transition from single-cell to multicellular behavior is important in early development but rarely studied. The starvation-induced aggregation of the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum into a multicellular slug is known to result…
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…
Eukaryotic cells sense chemical gradients to decide where and when to move. Clusters of cells can sense gradients more accurately than individual cells by integrating measurements of the concentration made across the cluster. Is this…
Muscle uses Ca2+ as a messenger to control contraction and relies on ATP to maintain the intracellular Ca2+ homeostasis. Mitochondria are the major sub-cellular organelle of ATP production. With a negative inner membrane potential,…
Quantum noise places a fundamental limit on the per photon sensitivity attainable in optical measurements. This limit is of particular importance in biological measurements, where the optical power must be constrained to avoid damage to the…
A phase field approach is proposed to model the chemotaxis of Dictyostelium discoideum. In this framework, motion is controlled by active forces as determined by the Meinhardt model of chemical dynamics which is used to simulate directional…
Single-cell studies often show significant phenotypic variability due to the stochastic nature of intra-cellular biochemical reactions. When the numbers of molecules, e.g., transcription factors and regulatory enzymes, are in low abundance,…
Quantitative experiments are described on spatio-temporal patterns of coherent chemical signaling activity in populations of {\it Dictyostelium discoideum} amoebae. We observe competition between spontaneously firing centers and rotating…
Many eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells can exhibit remarkable sensing ability under small gradient of chemical compound. In this study, we approach this phenomenon by considering the contribution of multiple ligands to the chemical kinetics…
A ubiquitous building block of signaling pathways is a cycle of covalent modification (e.g., phosphorylation and dephosphorylation in MAPK cascades). Our paper explores the kind of information processing and filtering that can be…
Robustness and sensitivity of responses generated by cell signaling networks has been associated with survival and evolvability of organisms. However, existing methods analyzing robustness and sensitivity of signaling networks ignore 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…
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…
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…