RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Receptor crosstalk improves concentration sensing of multiple ligands
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 448118
DO 10.1101/448118
A1 Martín Carballo-Pacheco
A1 Jonathan Desponds
A1 Tatyana Gavrilchenko
A1 Andreas Mayer
A1 Roshan Prizak
A1 Gautam Reddy
A1 Ilya Nemenman
A1 Thierry Mora
YR 2018
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/10/20/448118.abstract
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.