Know the single-receptor sensing limit? Think again

Abstract

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 ligand concentration with even the simplest device - a single receptor - is surprisingly hard to pin down. Recent studies provide conflicting results for the fundamental physical limits. Comparison is made difficult as different studies either suggest different readout mechanisms of the ligand-receptor occupancy, or differ on how ligand diffusion is implemented. Here we critically analyse these studies and present a unifying perspective on the limits of sensing, with wide-ranging biological implications.

25 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Efficiency of cellular information processing
• Thermodynamics of statistical inference by cells
• Memory improves precision of cell sensing in fluctuating environments
• Accurate encoding and decoding by single cells: amplitude versus frequency modulation

Cited by in corpus (17)

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• Mixed analytical-stochastic simulation method for the recovery of a Brownian gradient source from probability fluxes to small windows
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• Signal reconstruction in diffusion-based molecular communication
• Local Clustering and Global Spreading of Receptors for Optimal Spatial Gradient Sensing
• Using transcription-based detectors to emulate the behaviour of sequential probability ratio-based concentration detectors
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• Hunchback promoters can readout morphogenetic positional information in less than a minute
• Physical limits on chemical sensing in bounded domains
• Is E. coli good at chemotaxis?
• Fundamental limits of accuracy and precision in single molecule biosensors
• Computational methods and fast hybrid stochastic simulations for triangulation sensing and identifying principles of cell navigation in the brain