AMOLF, Science Park, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Elife. 2021 Feb 17;10:e62574. doi: 10.7554/eLife.62574.
Living cells often need to measure chemical concentrations that vary in time, yet how accurately they can do so is poorly understood. Here, we present a theory that fully specifies, without any adjustable parameters, the optimal design of a canonical sensing system in terms of two elementary design principles: (1) there exists an optimal integration time, which is determined by the input statistics and the number of receptors; and (2) in the optimally designed system, the number of independent concentration measurements as set by the number of receptors and the optimal integration time equals the number of readout molecules that store these measurements and equals the work to store these measurements reliably; no resource is then in excess and hence wasted. Applying our theory to the chemotaxis system indicates that its integration time is not only optimal for sensing shallow gradients but also necessary to enable navigation in these gradients.
活细胞通常需要测量随时间变化的化学浓度，但它们能做到多精确却知之甚少。在这里，我们提出了一个理论，该理论完全指定了一个规范传感系统的最优设计，而无需任何可调参数，其基于两个基本设计原则：（1）存在一个最优的积分时间，它由输入统计和受体数量决定；（2）在最优设计的系统中，由受体数量和最优积分时间设定的独立浓度测量的数量等于存储这些测量值的读出分子的数量，并且等于可靠存储这些测量值的工作量；那么就没有多余的资源被浪费。将我们的理论应用于趋化性系统表明，其积分时间不仅对感知浅梯度是最优的，而且对于在这些梯度中导航也是必需的。
