<i>E. coli</i> do not count single molecules.

ABSTRACT: Organisms use specialized sensors to measure their environments, but the fundamental principles that determine their accuracy remain largely unknown. In Escherichia coli chemotaxis, we previously found that gradient-climbing speed is bounded by the amount of information that cells acquire from their environment, and that E. coli operate near this bound. However, it remains unclear what prevents them from acquiring more information. Past work argued that E. coli's chemosensing is limited by the physics of molecules stochastically arriving at cells' receptors, without direct evidence. Here, we show instead that E. coli are far from this physical limit. To show this, we develop a theoretical approach that uses information rates to quantify how accurately behaviorally-relevant signals can be e

SUBMITTER: Mattingly HH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11257612 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature