Biological cells are often found to sense their chemical environment near the single-molecule detection limit. Surprisingly, this precision is higher than simple estimates of the fundamental physical limit, hinting towards active sensing strategies.
In this work, we analyse the effect of cell memory, e.g. from slow biochemical processes, on the precision of sensing by cell-surface receptors. We derive analytical formulas, which show that memory significantly improves sensing in weakly fluctuating environments. However, surprisingly when memory is adjusted dynamically, the precision is always improved, even in strongly fluctuating environments. In support of this prediction we quantify the directional biases in chemotactic Dictyostelium discoideum cells in a flow chamber with alternating chemical gradients. The strong similarities between cell sensing and control engineering suggest universal problem-solving strategies of living matter.
Biological cells sense external chemical stimuli in their environment using cell-surface receptors. To increase the sensitivity of sensing, receptors often cluster, most noticeably in bacterial chemotaxis, a paradigm for signaling and sensing in gene
ral. While amplification of weak stimuli is useful in absence of noise, its usefulness is less clear in presence of extrinsic input noise and intrinsic signaling noise. Here, exemplified on bacterial chemotaxis, we combine the allosteric Monod-Wyman- Changeux model for signal amplification by receptor complexes with calculations of noise to study their interconnectedness. Importantly, we calculate the signal-to-noise ratio, describing the balance of beneficial and detrimental effects of clustering for the cell. Interestingly, we find that there is no advantage for the cell to build receptor complexes for noisy input stimuli in absence of intrinsic signaling noise. However, with intrinsic noise, an optimal complex size arises in line with estimates of the sizes of chemoreceptor complexes in bacteria and protein aggregates in lipid rafts of eukaryotic cells.
