A. Mugler: Physical limits to cell sensing and decision-making

Many cells have evolved to sense their environment as precisely as physically possible. Therefore, understanding the physics of sensing can give important insights into cell biology. First pioneered half a century ago in the context of bacterial chemotaxis, this way of viewing sensory biology has expanded to include chemical sensing, mechanical sensing, temperature sensing, and more. I will use this perspective to understand the behavior of cancer cells that use self-guided chemotaxis to migrate downstream in fluid flow. At the same time, these cells use pressure sensing to migrate upstream, and the two mechanisms compete. Our theory allows us to determine whether the competition is decided by external physical information or by internal cellular signal-processing, and we expand this approach to other experiments in which different cues compete for a cell's attention. Our work reveals the fascinating physics that constrains cell behavior and provides a framework for quantitatively understanding cell decision-making