ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2008
Accuracy of direct gradient sensing by single cells.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2008. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 77 papers.
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Who cites it
77 citing papers in PubMed.
- ChemotaxingArXiv · 2025Article
- ChemotaxingbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Persistent pseudopod splitting is an effective chemotaxis strategy in shallow gradients.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Polarity-JaM: an image analysis toolbox for cell polarity, junction and morphology quantification.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Electrical signaling and coordinated behavior in the closest relative of animals.Science advances · 2025Article
- Information bounds on the accuracy of cell polarization.PloS one · 2025Article
- Physical extraction of antigen and information.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Memoryless chemotaxis with discrete cues.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Learning optimal integration of spatial and temporal information in noisy chemotaxis.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Active oscillations in microscale navigation.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- Single-cell directional sensing from just a few receptor binding events.Biophysical journal · 2023Article
- Short-time diffusive fluxes over membrane receptors yields the direction of a signalling source.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Immune cells use active tugging forces to distinguish affinity and accelerate evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Orientation of Cell Polarity by Chemical Gradients.Annual review of biophysics · 2022Review
- Signal processing capacity of the cellular sensory machinery regulates the accuracy of chemotaxis under complex cues.iScience · 2021Article
- Short-range quorum sensing controls horizontal gene transfer at micron scale in bacterial communities.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Origins of eukaryotic excitability.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Temporally regulated cell migration is sensitive to variation in body size.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2021Article
- Chemokinesis-driven accumulation of active colloids in low-mobility regions of fuel gradients.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Physical limits to sensing material properties.Nature communications · 2020Article
17 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Many types of cells are able to accurately sense shallow gradients of chemicals across their diameters, allowing the cells to move toward or away from chemical sources. This chemotactic ability relies on the remarkable capacity of cells to infer gradients from particles randomly arriving at cell-surface receptors by diffusion. Whereas the physical limits of concentration sensing by cells have been explored, there is no theory for the physical limits of gradient sensing. Here, we derive such a theory, using as models a perfectly absorbing sphere and a perfectly monitoring sphere, which, respectively, infer gradients from the absorbed surface particle density or the positions of freely diffusing particles inside a spherical volume. We find that the perfectly absorbing sphere is superior to the perfectly monitoring sphere, both for concentration and gradient sensing, because previously observed particles are never remeasured. The superiority of the absorbing sphere helps explain the presence at the surfaces of cells of signal-degrading enzymes, such as PDE for cAMP in Dictyostelium discoideum (Dicty) and BAR1 for mating factor alpha in Saccharomyces cerevisiae (budding yeast). Quantitatively, our theory compares favorably with recent measurements of Dicty moving up a cAMP gradient, suggesting these cells operate near the physical limits of gradient detection.
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