Triangulation Sensing to Determine the Gradient Source from Diffusing Particles to Small Cell Receptors

Ulrich Dobramysl and David Holcman
Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 148102 – Published 2 October 2020
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Abstract

How does a cell locate the source of molecular guidance cues from within a concentration gradient? We present a computational approach to recover the source from the absorbed fluxes at narrow receptor windows located on the surface of the cell. In the limit of fast binding, we solve the steady-state diffusion equation using an asymptotic approach and hybrid stochastic-analytical simulations. We show that the sensitivity to the gradient direction decays too rapidly to enable long-distance sensing. We illustrate how this constraint can be alleviated when triangulating the source with an increasing number of receptor windows and quantify the susceptibility of this process to flux perturbations.

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  • Received 11 November 2019
  • Accepted 3 September 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.148102

© 2020 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Physics of Living Systems

Authors & Affiliations

Ulrich Dobramysl1,2 and David Holcman3

  • 1Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 0WA, United Kingdom
  • 2Wellcome Trust / CRUK Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1QN, United Kingdom
  • 3Group Computational Biology and Data modeling, IBENS, Ecole Normale Superieure - PSL, Paris, France

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Issue

Vol. 125, Iss. 14 — 2 October 2020

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