title: 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.
authors.affiliation: Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027;
authors.forename: Garud
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Iyengar
authors.affiliation: Raman Research Institute, Bangalore 560080, India; and National Centre for Biological Sciences (TIFR), Bangalore 560065, India madan@ncbs.res.in.
authors.forename: Madan
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rao
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D001330:Electronic Data Processing / Q000379:methods*; D007257:Information Theory; D008954:Models, Biological; D011956:Receptors, Cell Surface / Q000378:metabolism*; D015398:Signal Transduction; D013269:Stochastic Processes
chemical_list: D011956:Receptors, Cell Surface
keywords: active mechanics; information optimization; protein sensors
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