Related papers: Perfect adaptation in eukaryotic gradient sensing …
Sensory systems have evolved to respond to input stimuli of certain statistical properties, and to reliably transmit this information through biochemical pathways. Hence, for an experimentally well-characterized sensory system, one ought to…
Here we characterized an information measure for cell polarity that applies to non-motile cells responding to a chemical gradient. The central idea is that polarization represents information about the direction of the gradient. We applied…
Bacterial chemotaxis is controlled by the signalling of a cluster of receptors. A cooperative model is presented, in which coupling between neighbouring receptor dimers enhances the sensitivity with which stimuli can be detected, without…
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…
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…
In chemotaxis, cells are modulating their migration patterns in response to concentration gradients of a guiding substance. Immune cells are believed to use such chemotactic sensing for remotely detecting and homing in on pathogens.…
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…
Cells rely on the ability to sense and respond to small spatial differences in chemoattractant concentrations for survival. There is growing evidence that this is accomplished by setting the signaling system near the threshold for…
Many signalling functions in molecular biology require proteins bind to substrates such as DNA in response to environmental signals such as the simultaneous binding to a small molecule. Examples are repressor proteins which may transmit…
Swimming bacteria detect chemical gradients by performing temporal comparisons of recent measurements of chemical concentration. These comparisons are described quantitatively by the chemotactic response function, which we expect to…
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…
We consider the chemotaxis problem for a one-dimensional system. To analyze the interaction of bacteria and attractant we use a modified Keller-Segel model which accounts attractant absorption. To describe the system we use the chemotaxis…
Experimental evidence lends support to the conjecture that the ability of chains of cells to sense the gradient of an external chemical concentration could rely on cell-to-cell communication. This is the basis for the gradient sensing…
Extending the classic works of Berg and Purcell on the biophysics of bacterial chemotaxis, we find the optimal chemotactic strategy for the peritrichous bacterium E. Coli in the high and low signal to noise ratio limits. The optimal…
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…
Specific interactions between receptors and their target ligands in the presence of non-target ligands are crucial for biological processes such as T cell ligand discrimination. To discriminate between the target and non-target ligands,…
We study methylation dynamics of the chemoreceptors as an {\sl E.coli} cell moves around in a spatially varying chemo-attractant environment. We consider attractant concentration with strong and weak spatial gradient. During the uphill and…
Microorganisms often perform chemotaxis, (i.e., sensing and moving toward a region with a higher concentration of an attractive chemical) by changing the rate of tumbling for random walk. We studied several models with internal adaptive…
Living cells often need to measure chemical concentrations that vary in time. To this end, they deploy many resources, e.g. receptors, downstream signaling molecules, time and energy. Here, we present a theory for the optimal design of a…
Aerotaxis is the particular form of chemotaxis in which oxygen plays the role of both the attractant and the repellent. Aerotaxis occurs without methylation adaptation, and it leads to fast and complete aggregation toward the most favorable…