Related papers: Perfect adaptation in eukaryotic gradient sensing …

Inputs to signaling pathways can have complex statistics that depend on the environment and on the behavioral response to previous stimuli. Such behavioral feedback is particularly important in navigation. Successful navigation relies on…

Collective cell responses to exogenous cues depend on cell-cell interactions. In principle, these can result in enhanced sensitivity to weak and noisy stimuli. However, this has not yet been shown experimentally, and, little is known about…

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…

Transmembrane receptor clustering is a ubiquitous phenomenon in pro- and eukaryotic cells to physically sense receptor/ligand interactions and subsequently translate an exogenous signal into a cellular response. Despite that receptor…

Developing physics-based models for molecular simulation requires fitting many unknown parameters to diverse experimental datasets. Traditionally, this process is piecemeal and difficult to reproduce, leading to a fragmented landscape of…

To perform recognition, molecules must locate and specifically bind their targets within a noisy biochemical environment with many look-alikes. Molecular recognition processes, especially the induced-fit mechanism, are known to involve…

In eukaryotic cell chemotaxis, cells extend and retract transient actin-driven protrusions at their membrane that facilitate both the detection of external chemical gradients and directional movement via the formation of focal adhesions…

Cells measure concentrations of external ligands by capturing ligand molecules with cell surface receptors. The numbers of molecules captured by different receptors co-vary because they depend on the same extrinsic ligand fluctuations.…

Many membrane channels and receptors exhibit adaptive, or desensitized, response to a strong sustained input stimulus, often supported by protein activity-dependent inactivation. Adaptive response is thought to be related to various…

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…

Eukaryotic cells can polarize and migrate in response to electric fields via "galvanotaxis," which aids wound healing. Experimental evidence suggests cells sense electric fields via molecules on the cell's surface redistributing via…

The specificity of molecular recognition is important to molecular self-organization. A prominent example is the biological cell where, within a highly crowded molecular environment, a myriad of different molecular receptor pairs recognize…

The discerning behavior of living systems relies on accurate interactions selected from the lot of molecular collisions occurring in the cell. To ensure the reliability of interactions, binding partners are classically envisioned as finely…

Cell membranes interact via anchored receptor and ligand molecules. Central questions on cell adhesion concern the binding affinity of these membrane-anchored molecules, the mechanisms leading to the receptor-ligand domains observed during…

Olfactory receptor usage is highly heterogeneous, with some receptor types being orders of magnitude more abundant than others. We propose an explanation for this striking fact: the receptor distribution is tuned to maximally represent…

Microorganisms like bacteria can sense concentration of chemo-attractants in its medium very accurately. They achieve this through interaction between the receptors on their cell surface and the chemo-attractant molecules (like sugar). But…

Chemotaxis of the bacterium Escherichia coli is well understood in shallow chemical gradients, but its swimming behavior remains difficult to interpret in steep gradients. By focusing on single-cell trajectories from simulations, we…

Models for chemotaxis are based on gradient sensing of individual organisms. The key contribution of Keller and Segel is showing that erratic movements of individuals may result in an accurate chemotaxis phenomenon as a group. In this paper…

We introduce a generic, purely mechanical model for environment sensitive motion of mammalian cells that is applicable to chemotaxis, haptotaxis, and durotaxis as modes of motility. It is able to theoretically explain all relevant…

For navigation, microscopic agents such as biological cells rely on noisy sensory input. In cells performing chemotaxis, such noise arises from the stochastic binding of signaling molecules at low concentrations. Using chemotaxis of sperm…