Cell-to-cell variation sets a tissue-rheology-dependent bound on collective gradient sensing

Abstract

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 genetically identical cells have differing responses to chemical signals. With theory and simulation, we show collective chemotaxis is limited by cell-to-cell variation in signaling. We find that when different cells cooperate the resulting bias can be much larger than the effects of ligand-receptor binding. Specifically, when a strongly-responding cell is at one end of a cell cluster, cluster motion is biased toward that cell. These errors are mitigated if clusters average measurements over times long enough for cells to rearrange. In consequence, fluid clusters are better able to sense gradients: we derive a link between cluster accuracy, cell-to-cell variation, and the cluster rheology. Because of this connection, increasing the noisiness of individual cell motion can actually increase the collective accuracy of a cluster by improving fluidity.

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Disentangling the Behavioural Variability of Confined Cell Migration
• Chemical Cloaking
• Chemotaxis in uncertain environments: hedging bets with multiple receptor types
• Effects of cell-cell adhesion on migration of multicellular clusters
• The gift of gab: probing the limits of dynamic concentration-sensing across a network of communicating cells