ArticlePhysical review letters2010
Physical limits on cellular sensing of spatial gradients.
Article in Physical review letters, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 46 papers.
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Who cites it
46 citing papers in PubMed.
- Perfect adaptation in eukaryotic gradient sensing using cooperative allosteric binding.Physical review. E · 2026Article
- Competing chemical gradients change chemotactic dynamics and cell distribution.Physical review. E · 2026Article
- Ratiometric signaling produces robust temporal integration for accurate cellular gradient sensing.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- 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
- Deposited footprints let cells switch between confined, oscillatory, and exploratory migration.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Limits on the accuracy of contact inhibition of locomotion.Physical review. E · 2024Article
- Cells function as a ternary logic gate to decide migration direction under integrated chemical and fluidic cues.Lab on a chip · 2023Article
- Orientation of Cell Polarity by Chemical Gradients.Annual review of biophysics · 2022Review
- Article
- Signal processing capacity of the cellular sensory machinery regulates the accuracy of chemotaxis under complex cues.iScience · 2021Article
- Close to Optimal Cell Sensing Ensures the Robustness of Tissue Differentiation Process: The Avian Photoreceptor Mosaic Case.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Improved bounds on entropy production in living systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Article
- The many bits of positional information.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2021Review
- Collective gradient sensing and chemotaxis: modeling and recent developments.Journal of physics. Condensed matter : an Institute of Physics journal · 2018Review
- A computational model for how cells choose temporal or spatial sensing during chemotaxis.PLoS computational biology · 2018Article
- Cell-to-cell variation sets a tissue-rheology-dependent bound on collective gradient sensing.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Simple biochemical networks allow accurate sensing of multiple ligands with a single receptor.PLoS computational biology · 2017Article
- Testing the limits of gradient sensing.PLoS computational biology · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Many eukaryotic cells are able to detect chemical gradients by directly measuring spatial concentration differences. The precision of such gradient sensing is limited by fluctuations in the binding of diffusing particles to specific receptors on the cell surface. Here, we explore the physical limits of the spatial sensing mechanism by modeling the chemotactic cell as an Ising spin chain subject to a spatially varying field. Our results demonstrate that the accuracy to sense the gradient direction not only increases dramatically with the cell size but also can be improved significantly by introducing receptor cooperativity. Thus, receptor coupling may open the possibility for small bacteria to perform spatial measurements of gradients, as supported by a recent experimental finding.
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