Single-cell directional sensing from just a few receptor binding events

Abstract

Identifying the directionality of signaling sources from noisy input to membrane receptors is an essential task performed by many cell types. A variety of models have been proposed to explain directional sensing in cells. However, many of these require significant computational and memory capacities for the cell. We propose and analyze a simple mechanism in which a cell adopts the direction associated with the first few membrane binding events. This model yields an accurate angular estimate to the source long before steady state is reached in biologically relevant scenarios. Our proposed mechanism allows for reliable estimates of the directionality of external signals using temporal information and assumes minimal computational capacities of the cell.