Fancher Sean, Mugler Andrew
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, USA.
Phys Rev Lett. 2017 Feb 17;118(7):078101. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.078101. Epub 2017 Feb 14.
The precision of concentration sensing is improved when cells communicate. Here we derive the physical limits to concentration sensing for cells that communicate over short distances by directly exchanging small molecules (juxtacrine signaling), or over longer distances by secreting and sensing a diffusive messenger molecule (autocrine signaling). In the latter case, we find that the optimal cell spacing can be large, due to a trade-off between maintaining communication strength and reducing signal cross-correlations. This leads to the surprising result that sparsely packed communicating cells sense concentrations more precisely than densely packed communicating cells. We compare our results to data from a wide variety of communicating cell types.
当细胞进行通讯时，浓度传感的精度会提高。在这里，我们推导了通过直接交换小分子进行短距离通讯（旁分泌信号传导）或通过分泌和感知扩散性信使分子进行长距离通讯（自分泌信号传导）的细胞浓度传感的物理极限。在后一种情况下，我们发现由于在维持通讯强度和减少信号互相关性之间存在权衡，最佳细胞间距可能会很大。这导致了一个令人惊讶的结果，即稀疏排列的通讯细胞比密集排列的通讯细胞能更精确地感知浓度。我们将我们的结果与来自多种通讯细胞类型的数据进行了比较。
