ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Cell-cell communication enhances the capacity of cell ensembles to sense shallow gradients during morphogenesis.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 74 papers.
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Who cites it
74 citing papers in PubMed.
- Directed migration of cancer cells: a systems biophysics perspective.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2026Review
- Emergent eukaryotic directional sensing via receptor degradation and diffusion.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Spatial Modeling of Tissues for Morphogenic Field Analysis.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Bridging single cells to organs: Mesoscale modules as fundamental units of tissue function.Cell · 2025Review
- Collective migration modes in development, tissue repair and cancer.Nature reviews. Molecular cell biology · 2025Review
- Strategies and applications of synthetic cell communication.Nature chemical biology · 2025Review
- Hi-C3: a statistical inference-based model for reconstructing higher-order cell-cell communication networks.Briefings in bioinformatics · 2025Article
- Specification of human brain regions with orthogonal gradients of WNT and SHH in organoids reveals patterning variations across cell lines.Cell stem cell · 2025Article
- Single-cell RNA transcriptome uncovers distinct developmental trajectories in the embryonic skeletal muscle of Daheng broiler and Tibetan chicken.BMC genomics · 2025Article
- AI-powered simulation-based inference of a genuinely spatial-stochastic gene regulation model of early mouse embryogenesis.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Decoding physical principles of cell migration under controlled environment using microfluidics.Biophysics reviews · 2024Review
- Revealing cell-cell communication pathways with their spatially coupled gene programs.Briefings in bioinformatics · 2024Article
- Article
- Collective directional migration drives the formation of heteroclonal cancer cell clusters.Molecular oncology · 2023Article
- Single-cell directional sensing from just a few receptor binding events.Biophysical journal · 2023Article
- The impact of cell size on morphogen gradient precision.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2023Article
- High-throughput co-culture system for analysis of spatiotemporal cell-cell signaling.Biosensors & bioelectronics · 2023Article
- Cells function as a ternary logic gate to decide migration direction under integrated chemical and fluidic cues.Lab on a chip · 2023Article
- Epigenetics as a mediator of plasticity in cancer.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2023Review
- Characterizing the Impact of Communication on Cellular and Collective Behavior Using a Three-Dimensional Multiscale Cellular Model.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
14 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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12 authors.
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Abstract
Collective cell responses to exogenous cues depend on cell-cell interactions. In principle, these can result in enhanced sensitivity to weak and noisy stimuli. However, this has not yet been shown experimentally, and little is known about how multicellular signal processing modulates single-cell sensitivity to extracellular signaling inputs, including those guiding complex changes in the tissue form and function. Here we explored whether cell-cell communication can enhance the ability of cell ensembles to sense and respond to weak gradients of chemotactic cues. Using a combination of experiments with mammary epithelial cells and mathematical modeling, we find that multicellular sensing enables detection of and response to shallow epidermal growth factor (EGF) gradients that are undetectable by single cells. However, the advantage of this type of gradient sensing is limited by the noisiness of the signaling relay, necessary to integrate spatially distributed ligand concentration information. We calculate the fundamental sensory limits imposed by this communication noise and combine them with the experimental data to estimate the effective size of multicellular sensory groups involved in gradient sensing. Functional experiments strongly implicated intercellular communication through gap junctions and calcium release from intracellular stores as mediators of collective gradient sensing. The resulting integrative analysis provides a framework for understanding the advantages and limitations of sensory information processing by relays of chemically coupled cells.
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