期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2017
卷号：114
期号：47
页码：E10074-E10082
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1712309114
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：When a single cell senses a chemical gradient and chemotaxes, stochastic receptor–ligand binding can be a fundamental limit to the cell’s accuracy. For clusters of cells responding to gradients, however, there is a critical difference: Even genetically identical cells have differing responses to chemical signals. With theory and simulation, we show collective chemotaxis is limited by cell-to-cell variation in signaling. We find that when different cells cooperate, the resulting bias can be much larger than the effects of ligand–receptor binding. Specifically, when a strongly responding cell is at one end of a cell cluster, cluster motion is biased toward that cell. These errors are mitigated if clusters average measurements over times long enough for cells to rearrange. In consequence, fluid clusters are better able to sense gradients: We derive a link between cluster accuracy, cell-to-cell variation, and the cluster rheology. Because of this connection, increasing the noisiness of individual cell motion can actually increase the collective accuracy of a cluster by improving fluidity.
