The limits of chemosensation vary across dimensions

Brendan A. Bicknell, Peter Dayan and Geoffrey J. Goodhill ()
Additional contact information
Brendan A. Bicknell: Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland
Peter Dayan: Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London
Geoffrey J. Goodhill: Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland

Nature Communications, 2015, vol. 6, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Many biological processes rely on the ability of cells to measure local ligand concentration. However, such measurements are constrained by noise arising from diffusion and the stochastic nature of receptor–ligand interactions. It is thus critical to understand how accurately, in principle, concentration measurements can be made. Previous theoretical work has mostly investigated this in 3D under the simplifying assumption of an unbounded domain of diffusion, but many biological problems involve 2D concentration measurement in bounded domains, for which diffusion behaves quite differently. Here we present a theory of the precision of chemosensation that covers bounded domains of any dimensionality. We find that the quality of chemosensation in lower dimensions is controlled by domain size, suggesting a general principle applicable to many biological systems. Applying the theory to biological problems in 2D shows that diffusion-limited signalling is an efficient mechanism on time scales consistent with behaviour.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8468 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:6:y:2015:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms8468

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms8468

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().