Related papers: Single-cell directional sensing at ultra-low chemo…
In biological cells and novel diagnostic devices biochemical receptors need to be sensitive to extremely small concentration changes of signaling molecules. The accuracy of such molecular signaling is ultimately limited by the counting…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Eukaryotic cells are able to sense chemical gradients in a wide range of environments. We show that, if a cell is exposed to a highly variable environment, it may gain chemotactic accuracy by expressing multiple receptor types with varying…
This work localizes a molecular source in a diffusion based molecular communication (DbMC) system via a set of passive sensors and a fusion center. Molecular source localization finds its applications in future healthcare systems, including…
How can cells embedded into a gradient concentration triangulate the position of the source and migrate toward their final destination? The source triangulation requires to recover the three dimensional coordinates of the source from the…
Cells are constantly exposed to diverse stimuli-chemical, mechanical, or electrical-that guide their movement. In physiological conditions, these signals often overlap, as seen during infections, where neutrophils and dendritic cells…
Many types of cells can sense external ligand concentrations with cell-surface receptors at extremely high accuracy. Interestingly, ligand-bound receptors are often internalized, a process also known as receptor-mediated endocytosis. While…
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…
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…
Chemotactic cells of eukaryotic organisms are able to accurately sense shallow chemical concentration gradients using cell-surface receptors. This sensing ability is remarkable as cells must be able to spatially resolve small fractional…
Cells use surface receptors to estimate the concentration of external ligands. Limits on the accuracy of such estimations have been well studied for pairs of ligand and receptor species. However, the environment typically contains many…
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…
Chemotaxis is typically modeled in the context of cellular motion towards a static, exogenous source of chemoattractant. Here, we propose a time-dependent mechanism of chemotaxis in which a self-propelled particle ({\it e.g.}, a cell)…
Directional chemosensing is ubiquitous in cell biology, but some cells such as mating yeast paradoxically degrade the signal they aim to detect. While the data processing inequality suggests that such signal modification cannot increase the…
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…
Adherent cells have long been known to display two modes during migration: a faster mode that is persistent in direction and a slower one where they turn. Compared to the persistent mode, the turns are less studied. Here we develop a simple…
Berg and Purcell [Biophys. J. 20, 193 (1977)] calculated how the accuracy of concentration sensing by single-celled organisms is limited by noise from the small number of counted molecules. Here we generalize their results to the sensing of…