Fundamental Limits to Cellular Sensing
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Published version
Author(s)
ten Wolde, PR
Becker, NB
Ouldridge, TE
Mugler, A
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
In recent years experiments have demonstrated that living cells can measure low chemical concentrations with high precision, and much progress has been made in understanding what sets the fundamental limit to the precision of chemical sensing. Chemical concentration measurements start with the binding of ligand molecules to receptor proteins, which is an inherently noisy process, especially at low concentrations. The signaling networks that transmit the information on the ligand concentration from the receptors into the cell have to filter this receptor input noise as much as possible. These networks, however, are also intrinsically stochastic in nature, which means that they will also add noise to the transmitted signal. In this review, we will first discuss how the diffusive transport and binding of ligand to the receptor sets the receptor correlation time, which is the timescale over which fluctuations in the state of the receptor, arising from the stochastic receptor-ligand binding, decay. We then describe how downstream signaling pathways integrate these receptor-state fluctuations, and how the number of receptors, the receptor correlation time, and the effective integration time set by the downstream network, together impose a fundamental limit on the precision of sensing. We then discuss how cells can remove the receptor input noise while simultaneously suppressing the intrinsic noise in the signaling network. We describe why this mechanism of time integration requires three classes (groups) of resources—receptors and their integration time, readout molecules, energy—and how each resource class sets a fundamental sensing limit. We also briefly discuss the scheme of maximum-likelihood estimation, the role of receptor cooperativity, and how cellular copy protocols differ from canonical copy protocols typically considered in the computational literature, explaining why cellular sensing systems can never reach the Landauer limit on the optimal trade-off between accuracy and energetic cost.
Date Issued
2016-01-18
Date Acceptance
2015-12-22
Citation
Journal of Statistical Physics, 2016, 162 (5), pp.1395-1424
ISSN
1572-9613
Publisher
Springer Verlag
Start Page
1395
End Page
1424
Journal / Book Title
Journal of Statistical Physics
Volume
162
Issue
5
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
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Subjects
Science & Technology
Physical Sciences
Physics, Mathematical
Physics
Biophysics
Cell signaling
Entropy
Information
DIFFUSION-INFLUENCED REACTIONS
SIGNAL-TRANSDUCTION
POSITIONAL INFORMATION
GENE-EXPRESSION
DYNAMICS
PROTEIN
CELLS
KINETICS
NOISE
APPROXIMATION
q-bio.MN
physics.bio-ph
q-bio.SC
Fluids & Plasmas
01 Mathematical Sciences
02 Physical Sciences
Publication Status
Published