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  • Open Access

Theoretical upper bound of multiplexing in biological sensory receptors

Asawari Pagare*, Sa Hoon Min*, and Zhiyue Lu†

  • Department of Chemistry, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599, USA

  • *These authors contributed equally to this work.
  • †zhiyuelu@unc.edu
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Phys. Rev. Research 5, 023032 – Published 17 April, 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.5.023032

Abstract

Biological sensory receptors provide excellent examples of microscopic scale information transduction amidst stochastic noise. We argue that stochasticity is not always a hindrance to sensing. Instead, it could allow a single stochastic sensor to perform multiplexing: simultaneously transducing multiple types of environmental information to the downstream sensory network. Through a Langevin dynamics simulation of a ligand-receptor sensor in a bath of ligands, we demonstrate that a binary-state receptor can simultaneously encode multiple independent environmental variables, such as ligand concentration and the speed of media flow. We develop a general theory of stochastic sensory multiplexing and suggest two theoretical upper bounds. Furthermore, we conjecture that randomly generated sensors typically saturate the tighter upper bound. The theoretical framework developed in this study, which involves a rank-deficient maximum likelihood analysis (rd-MLE), provides a systematic approach to comprehensively assess a sensor's sensory ability without any initial assumptions. This theoretical framework can inspire the design of more efficient artificial sensors.

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Phys. Rev. Research 5, 023032– Published 17 April, 2023
  • Received 16 September 2022
  • Accepted 29 March 2023
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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