Chemotaxing E. coli do not count single molecules

TL;DR

E. coli chemotaxis operates far from the physical limit of information acquisition, with internal noise in signal processing, rather than molecule arrival physics, constraining their sensing accuracy.

Contribution

The paper introduces a theoretical framework using information rates to compare physical and biological limits of chemotactic sensing in E. coli.

Findings

E. coli encode two orders of magnitude less information than the physical limit.

Chemotactic sensing is limited by internal noise, not molecule arrival physics.

E. coli operate far from the physical information acquisition limit.

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 estimated from available observations: molecule arrivals for the physical limit; chemotaxis signaling activity for E. coli. Measuring these information rates in single-cell experiments across multiple background concentrations, we find that E. coli encode two orders of magnitude less information than the physical limit. Thus, E. coli chemosensing is limited by internal noise in signal processing rather than the physics of molecule diffusion, motivating investigation of what specific physical and biological constraints shaped the evolution of this prototypical sensory system.