Related papers: Physical limits to biochemical signaling
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…
Chemotaxis is the physical phenomenon that bacteria adjust their motions according to chemical stimulus. A classical model for this phenomenon is a kinetic equation that describes the velocity jump process whose tumbling/transition kernel…
Biological cells sense external chemical stimuli in their environment using cell-surface receptors. To increase the sensitivity of sensing, receptors often cluster, most noticeably in bacterial chemotaxis, a paradigm for signaling and…
State transitions are fundamental in biological systems but challenging to observe directly. Here, we present the first single-cell observation of state transitions in a synthetic bacterial genetic circuit. Using a mother machine, we…
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…
One of the primary computational requirements of a cellular system is the ability to transfer information between spatially separated components. To accomplish this, biology uses diverse physical channels including production or release of…
Cellular biology exists embedded in a world dominated by random dynamics and chance. Many vital molecules and pieces of cellular machinery diffuse within cells, moving along random trajectories as they collide with the other biomolecular…
Quantitative single cell measurements have shown that cell cycle duration (the time between cell divisions) for diverse cell types is a noisy variable. The underlying distribution is mean scalable with a universal shape for many cell types…
Chemotaxis plays a crucial role in a variety of processes in biology and ecology. Quite often it acts to improve efficiency of biological reactions; one example is the immune system signalling, where infected tissues release chemokines…
Bacteria are able to respond to environmental signals by changing their rules of movement. When we take into account chemical signals in the environment, this behaviour is often called chemotaxis. At the individual-level, chemotaxis…
Even in the steady-state, the number of biomolecules in living cells fluctuates dynamically; and the frequency spectrum of this chemical fluctuation carries valuable information about the mechanism and the dynamics of the intracellular…
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 cellular components are present in such low numbers that individual stochastic production and degradation events lead to significant fluctuations in molecular abundances. Although feedback control can, in principle, suppress such…
The chemotaxis pathway in the bacterium Escherichia coli allows cells to detect changes in external ligand concentration (e.g. nutrients). The pathway regulates the flagellated rotary motors and hence the cells' swimming behaviour, steering…
Single-cell studies often show significant phenotypic variability due to the stochastic nature of intra-cellular biochemical reactions. When the numbers of molecules, e.g., transcription factors and regulatory enzymes, are in low abundance,…
Artificially engineered biosensors are highly inefficient in accurately measuring the concentration of biomarkers, particularly, during early diagnosis of diseases. On the other hand, single cellular systems such as chemotactic bacteria can…
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…
Exploiting the information provided by the molecular noise of a biological process has proven to be valuable in extracting knowledge about the underlying kinetic parameters and sources of variability from single cell measurements. However,…
Currently, biological signaling is envisaged as a combination of activation and movement, triggered by local molecular interactions and molecular diffusion, respectively. However, we here suggest, that other fundamental physical mechanisms…
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…