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A cellular solution to an information-processing problem.

ABSTRACT: Signaling receptors on the cell surface are mobile and have evolved to efficiently sense and process mechanical or chemical information. We pose the problem of identifying the optimal strategy for placing a collection of distributed and mobile sensors to faithfully estimate a signal that varies in space and time. The optimal strategy has to balance two opposing objectives: the need to locally assemble sensors to reduce estimation noise and the need to spread them to reduce spatial error. This results in a phase transition in the space of strategies as a function of sensor density and efficiency. We show that these optimal strategies have been arrived at multiple times in diverse cell biology contexts, including the stationary lattice architecture of receptors on the bacterial cell surface and the active clustering of cell-surface signaling receptors in metazoan cells.

SUBMITTER: Iyengar G

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4151762 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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A cellular solution to an information-processing problem.

Iyengar Garud G Rao Madan M

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20140811 34

Signaling receptors on the cell surface are mobile and have evolved to efficiently sense and process mechanical or chemical information. We pose the problem of identifying the optimal strategy for placing a collection of distributed and mobile sensors to faithfully estimate a signal that varies in space and time. The optimal strategy has to balance two opposing objectives: the need to locally assemble sensors to reduce estimation noise and the need to spread them to reduce spatial error. This re ...[more]

PMID: 25114246

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A cellular solution to an information-processing problem.

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A cellular solution to an information-processing problem.

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