Andrew Mugler

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  Physical limits to collective sensing by communicating cells
  Andrew Mugler
  Single cells sense their environment with remarkable precision. At the same time, cells have evolved diverse mechanisms for communicating. How are sensing and communication related? I will describe recent theoretical and experimental results in which this question is explored in several contexts, including gradient detection by connected epithelial cells, and collective invasion of breast cancer cells. I will show how communication allows cells to perform qualitatively new behaviors that single cells cannot perform alone. Moreover, I will demonstrate that minimal mathematical modeling yields fundamental limits to the precision of sensing, and that these limits are critically altered by cell-to-cell communication. This work extends the study of cellular sensing and information processing to collective ensembles.