Related papers: Perfect adaptation in eukaryotic gradient sensing …

The biophysical interactions between the T cell receptor (TCR) and its ligands determine the specificity of the cellular immune response. However, the immense diversity of receptors and ligands has made it challenging to discover…

The adhesion of cell membranes is mediated by the binding of membrane-anchored receptor and ligand proteins. In this article, we review recent results from simulations and theory that lead to novel insights on how the binding equilibrium…

We investigate single-cell directional sensing from diffusing chemoattractant signals released by a localized source. We focus on the low-concentration regime in which receptor activity is discrete and cellular decisions are made on…

Organisms must acquire and use environmental information to guide their behaviors. However, it is unclear whether and how information quantitatively limits behavioral performance. Here, we relate information to behavioral performance in…

Various biological sensory systems exhibit a response to a relative change of the stimulus, often referred to as fold-change detection. In the last few years fold-change detecting mechanisms, based on transcriptional networks, have been…

For a paradigmatic model of chemotaxis, we analyze the effect how a nonzero affinity driving receptors out of equilibrium affects sensitivity. This affinity arises whenever changes in receptor activity involve ATP hydrolysis. The…

Bacteria are often exposed to multiple stimuli in complex environments, and their efficient chemotactic decisions are critical to survive and grow in their native environments. Bacterial responses to the environmental stimuli depend on the…

We devise an approach for targeted molecular design, a problem of interest in computational drug discovery: given a target protein site, we wish to generate a chemical with both high binding affinity to the target and satisfactory…

Biological cells are able to adapt their behaviour in response to environmental cues. Durotaxis is a phenomenon in which cells adjust their migration depending on the mechanical properties of a surrounding substrate. Although durotaxis has…

Single-cell organisms and various cell types use a range of motility modes when following a chemical gradient, but it is unclear which mode is best suited for different gradients. Here, we model directional decision-making in chemotactic…

The adhesion of biological membranes is mediated by the binding of membrane-anchored receptor and ligand proteins. Central questions are how the binding kinetics of these proteins is affected by the membranes and by the membrane anchoring…

The behaviour of an organism often reflects a strategy for coping with its environment. Such behaviour in higher organisms can often be reduced to a few stereotyped modes of movement due to physiological limitations, but finding such modes…

We investigate the boundary between chemotaxis driven by spatial estimation of gradients and chemotaxis driven by temporal estimation. While it is well known that spatial chemotaxis becomes disadvantageous for small organisms at high noise…

The simulation of detector response is a vital aspect of data analysis in particle physics, but current Monte Carlo methods are computationally expensive. Machine learning methods, which learn a mapping from incident particle to detector…

Many eukaryotic cells chemotax, sensing and following chemical gradients. However, experiments have shown that even under conditions when single cells cannot chemotax, small clusters may still follow a gradient. This behavior has been…

Accurate measurements of kinetic rate constants for interacting biomolecules is crucial for understanding the mechanisms underlying intracellular signalling pathways. The magnitude of binding rates plays a very important molecular…

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…

Bacterial chemotaxis in Escherichia coli is a canonical system for the study of signal transduction. A remarkable feature of this system is the coexistence of precise adaptation in population with large fluctuating cellular behavior in…

Molecular interactions are key to many chemical and biological processes like protein function. In many signaling processes they occur in sub-cellular areas displaying nanoscale organizations and involving molecular assemblies. The…

Cell-to-cell variations in protein abundance in clonal cell populations are ubiquitous in living systems. Since protein composition determines responses in individual cells, it stands to reason that the variations themselves are subject to…