Related papers: Physical limits to biochemical signaling
Bacterial chemotaxis has long been viewed as operating near the physical limits of sensing, as originally articulated by Berg and Purcell. Recent information-theoretic analyses challenge this view, suggesting that Escherichia coli uses only…
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…
Kinetic-transport equations that take into account the intra-cellular pathways are now considered as the correct description of bacterial chemotaxis by run and tumble. Recent mathematical studies have shown their interest and their…
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…
Many chemotactic bacteria inhabit environments in which chemicals appear as localized pulses and evolve by processes such as diffusion and mixing. We show that, in such environments, physical limits on the accuracy of temporal gradient…
Bacteria track chemical gradients using a biased random walk, a process called chemotaxis. Experiments suggest that bacteria also communicate during this process. Using a mathematical model, we find that sufficiently strong communication…
Living cells often need to extract information from biochemical signals that are noisy. We study how accurately cells can measure chemical concentrations with signaling networks that are linear. For stationary signals of long duration, they…
Escherichia coli has long been used as a model organism due to the extensive experimental characterization of its pathways and molecular components. Take chemotaxis as an example, which allows bacteria to sense and swim in response to…
Chemotaxis in bacteria such as \textit{E.\ coli} is controlled by the slow methylation of chemoreceptors. As a consequence, intrinsic time and length scales of tens of seconds and hundreds of micrometers emerge, making the Keller--Segel…
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…
Bacteria seem masters of chemotaxis, yet recent work suggests otherwise. Henry Mattingly and colleagues (Nature Physics, 2026) argue that Escherichia coli uses only a small fraction of the sensory information available at its surface,…
Noise in transduction of chemotactic stimuli to the flagellar motor of E. coli will affect the random run-and-tumble motion of the cell and the ability to perform chemotaxis. Here we use numerical simulations to show that an intermediate…
Information transmission in biological signaling circuits has often been described using the metaphor of a noise filter. Cellular systems need accurate, real-time data about their environmental conditions, but the biochemical reaction…
Physical limit of molecular sensing has been extensively studied in biological systems. Biosensors are engineered equivalents of molecular sensors in living systems and play critical role in disease diagnosis and management. Investigation…
Biochemical reaction networks in living cells usually involve reversible covalent modification of signaling molecules, such as protein phosphorylation. Under conditions of small molecule numbers, as is frequently the case in living cells,…
Cooperative interactions among the binding of multiple signaling molecules is a common mechanism for enhancing the sensitivity of biological signaling systems. It is widely assumed that this increase in sensitivity of the mean response…
When cells measure concentrations of chemical signals, they may average multiple measurements over time in order to reduce noise in their measurements. However, when cells are in a environment that changes over time, past measurements may…
It has been generally recognized that stochasticity can play an important role in the information processing accomplished by reaction networks in biological cells. Most treatments of that stochasticity employ Gaussian noise even though it…
Biological signaling is imagined as a combination of activation and transport. The former is triggered by local molecular interactions and the latter is the result of molecular diffusion. However, other fundamental physical principles of…
Cells respond to chemical cues, and the precision with which they can sense these cues is fundamentally limited by the stochastic nature of diffusion and ligand binding. Berg and Purcell famously investigated how well a small sensor in an…