Department of Mathematics, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon 97331, USA.
Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027, USA.
Phys Rev E. 2021 Feb;103(2-1):022405. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.103.022405.
Experimental evidence lends support to the conjecture that cell-to-cell communication plays a role in the gradient sensing of chemical species by certain chains of cells. Models have been formulated to explore this idea. For cells with no identifiable sensing structure, Mugler et al. [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (U.S.A.) 113, E689 (2016)10.1073/pnas.1509597112] have defined a particular local excitation, global inhibition (LEGI) model that pits nearest-neighbor communication against local reactions in a noisy environment to suggest how this sensing capability might arise in a physical system. In this study, we generalize the nearest-neighbor communication mechanism in the aforementioned LEGI model in order to explore the extent to which the gradient sensing characteristics depend on the parametrization of the communication itself, as well as on the cell size, the radius of influence of neighboring cells, and the influence of the background noise. Using our generalization and a collection of particular candidate communication models, we find that the precision of gradient sensing is indeed sensitive to the particular communication model, and we derive physical and analytic explanations for these results. The framework established and the associated results should prove useful in understanding the appropriateness of particular cell-to-cell communication models in gradient sensing studies.
实验证据支持了这样一种推测，即细胞间通讯在某些细胞链对化学物质的梯度感应中发挥作用。已经提出了模型来探索这个想法。对于没有可识别的感应结构的细胞，Mugler 等人[Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (U.S.A.) 113, E689 (2016)10.1073/pnas.1509597112]定义了一个特殊的局部激发、全局抑制（LEGI）模型，该模型将最近邻通讯与噪声环境中的局部反应进行对比，以提出这种感应能力如何在物理系统中出现。在本研究中，我们推广了上述 LEGI 模型中的最近邻通讯机制，以探讨梯度感应特性在多大程度上取决于通讯本身的参数化，以及细胞大小、相邻细胞的影响半径和背景噪声的影响。使用我们的推广和一系列特定的候选通讯模型，我们发现梯度感应的精度确实对特定的通讯模型敏感，并且我们为这些结果提供了物理和分析解释。所建立的框架和相关结果应该有助于理解在梯度感应研究中特定细胞间通讯模型的适当性。
