Fundamental Limits to Collective Concentration Sensing in Cell Populations.

The precision of concentration sensing is improved when cells communicate. Here we derive the physical limits to concentration sensing for cells that communicate over short distances by directly exchanging small molecules (juxtacrine signaling), or over longer distances by secreting and sensing a diffusive messenger molecule (autocrine signaling). In the latter case, we find that the optimal cell spacing can be large, due to a trade-off between maintaining communication strength and reducing signal cross-correlations. This leads to the surprising result that sparsely packed communicating cells sense concentrations more precisely than densely packed communicating cells. We compare our results to data from a wide variety of communicating cell types.

• Publication year

  2016

• Venue

  Physical Review Letters

• Publication date

  2016-03-14

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Physics, Chemistry

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.078101arXiv 1603.04108PMID 28256844
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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