ArticleBiophysical journal2014
The Berg-Purcell limit revisited.
Article in Biophysical journal, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers.
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40 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Proofreading does not result in more reliable ligand discrimination in receptor signaling due to its inherent stochasticity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- How does an organism extract relevant information from transcription factor concentrations?Biochemical Society transactions · 2022Review
- Trading bits in the readout from a genetic network.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Physical observables to determine the nature of membrane-less cellular sub-compartments.eLife · 2021Article
- Revising Berg-Purcell for finite receptor kinetics.Biophysical journal · 2021Article
- Concentration sensing in crowded environments.Biophysical journal · 2021Article
- Article
- Nonequilibrium models of optimal enhancer function.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Physical limits to sensing material properties.Nature communications · 2020Article
- A mechanism foreLife · 2020Article
- Negative feedback increases information transmission, enabling bacteria to discriminate sublethal antibiotic concentrations.Science advances · 2018Article
- Diverse Spatial Expression Patterns Emerge from Unified Kinetics of Transcriptional Bursting.Cell · 2018Article
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6 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Biological systems often have to measure extremely low concentrations of chemicals with high precision. When dealing with such small numbers of molecules, the inevitable randomness of physical transport processes and binding reactions will limit the precision with which measurements can be made. An important question is what the lower bound on the noise would be in such measurements. Using the theory of diffusion-influenced reactions, we derive an analytical expression for the precision of concentration estimates that are obtained by monitoring the state of a receptor to which a diffusing ligand can bind. The variance in the estimate consists of two terms, one resulting from the intrinsic binding kinetics and the other from the diffusive arrival of ligand at the receptor. The latter term is identical to the fundamental limit derived by Berg and Purcell (Biophys. J., 1977), but disagrees with a more recent expression by Bialek and Setayeshgar. Comparing the theoretical predictions against results from particle-based simulations confirms the accuracy of the resulting expression and reaffirms the fundamental limit established by Berg and Purcell.
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