PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Martín Carballo-Pacheco
AU  - Jonathan Desponds
AU  - Tatyana Gavrilchenko
AU  - Andreas Mayer
AU  - Roshan Prizak
AU  - Gautam Reddy
AU  - Ilya Nemenman
AU  - Thierry Mora
TI  - Receptor crosstalk improves concentration sensing of multiple ligands
AID  - 10.1101/448118
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 448118
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/10/20/448118.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/10/20/448118.full
AB  - Cells need to reliably sense external ligand concentrations to achieve various biological functions such as chemotaxis or signaling. The molecular recognition of ligands by surface receptors is degenerate in many systems leading to crosstalk between different receptors. Crosstalk is often thought of as a deviation from optimal specific recognition, as the binding of non-cognate ligands can interfere with the detection of the receptor’s cognate ligand, possibly leading to a false triggering of a downstream signaling pathway. Here we quantify the optimal precision of sensing the concentrations of multiple ligands by a collection of promiscuous receptors. We demonstrate that crosstalk can improve precision in concentration sensing and discrimination tasks. To achieve superior precision, the additional information about ligand concentrations contained in short binding events of the noncognate ligand should be exploited. We present a proofreading scheme to realize an approximate estimation of multiple ligand concentrations that reaches a precision close to the derived optimal bounds. Our results help rationalize the observed ubiquity of receptor crosstalk in molecular sensing.