• DOI:10.1103/PhysRevE.94.022425
• Corpus ID: 12874443

Effects of receptor correlations on molecular information transmission.

@article{Singh2016EffectsOR,
  title={Effects of receptor correlations on molecular information transmission.},
  author={Vijay Singh and Martin Tchernookov and Ilya Nemenman},
  journal={Physical review. E},
  year={2016},
  volume={94 2-1},
  pages={
          022425
        }
}

• Vijay Singh, M. Tchernookov, I. Nemenman
• Published 26 February 2016
• Biology
• Physical review. E

Cells measure concentrations of external ligands by capturing ligand molecules with cell surface receptors. The numbers of molecules captured by different receptors co-vary because they depend on the same extrinsic ligand fluctuations. However, these numbers also counter-vary due to the intrinsic stochasticity of chemical processes because a single molecule randomly captured by a receptor cannot be captured by another. Such structure of receptor correlations is generally believed to lead to an increase in information about the external signal compared to the case of independent receptors. We analyze a solvable model of two molecular receptors and show that, contrary to this widespread expectation, the correlations have a small and negative effect on the information about the ligand concentration. Further, we show that measurements that average over multiple receptors are almost as informative as those that track the states of every individual one.