Related papers: Clustering and Signalling of Cell Receptors
Intracellular signaling often arises from ligand-induced oligomerization of cell surface receptors. This oligomerization or clustering process is fundamentally a cooperative behavior between near-neighbor receptor molecules; the properties…
Receptor-ligand binding is a critical first step in signal transduction and the duration of the interaction can impact signal generation. In mammalian cells, clustering of receptors may be facilitated by heterogeneous zones of lipids, known…
In many cellular signaling pathways, key components form clusters at the cell membrane. Although much work has focused on the mechanisms behind such cluster formation, the implications for downstream signaling remain poorly understood.…
Spatial information from cell-surface receptors is crucial for processes that require signal processing and sensing of the environment. Here, we investigate the optimal placement of such receptors through a theoretical model that minimizes…
We show how the competition between sensing and adaptation can result in a performance peak in E.coli chemotaxis using extensive numerical simulations in a detailed theoretical model. Receptor clustering amplifies the input signal coming…
Positive feedback regulation is ubiquitous in cell signaling networks, often leading to binary outcomes in response to graded stimuli. However, the role of such feedbacks in clustering, and in spatial spreading of activated molecules, has…
We propose a model of mass-conserving heterogeneous nucleation to describe the dynamics of ligand-receptor binding in closed cellular compartments. When the ligand dissociation rate is small, competition among receptors for free ligands…
Receptors of bacterial chemotaxis form clusters at the cell poles, where clusters act as "antennas" to amplify small changes in ligand concentration. Interestingly, chemoreceptors cluster at multiple length scales. At the smallest scale,…
Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) signaling is involved in the process of blood vessel development and maintenance. Signaling is initiated by binding of the bivalent VEGF ligand to the membrane-bound receptors (VEGFR), which in turn…
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…
Turing mechanisms can yield a large variety of patterns from noisy, homogenous initial conditions and have been proposed as patterning mechanism for many developmental processes. However, the molecular components that give rise to Turing…
Many membrane-bound molecules in cells form small clusters. It has been hypothesized that these clusters convert an analog extracellular signal into a digital intracellular signal and that this conversion increases signaling fidelity.…
Protein aggregation on the plasma membrane (PM) is of critical importance to many cellular processes such as cell adhesion, endocytosis, fibrillar conformation, and vesicle transport. Lateral diffusion of protein aggregates or clusters on…
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.…
When a single cell senses a chemical gradient and chemotaxes, stochastic receptor-ligand binding can be a fundamental limit to the cell's accuracy. For clusters of cells responding to gradients, however, there is a critical difference: even…
Clustering of molecules on biological membranes is a widely observed phenomenon. In some cases, such as the clustering of Ras proteins on the membranes of mammalian cells, proper cell signaling is critically dependent on the maintenance of…
Bacterial chemotaxis is controlled by the conformational changes of the receptors, in response to the change of the ambient chemical concentration. In a statistical mechanical approach, the signalling due to the conformational changes is a…
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…
Most sensory cells use surface receptors to detect environmental stimuli and initiate downstream signaling. Cooperative interactions among sensory receptors is known to play a crucial role in enhancing the sensitivity of biochemical…
In many sensory systems, transmembrane receptors are spatially organized in large clusters. Such arrangement may facilitate signal amplification and the integration of multiple stimuli. However, this organization likely also affects the…