{"id":244086,"date":"2026-09-15T21:27:22","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T02:27:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/cells-put-a-price-tag-on-sensing-their-world"},"modified":"2026-09-15T21:27:22","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T02:27:22","slug":"cells-put-a-price-tag-on-sensing-their-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/cells-put-a-price-tag-on-sensing-their-world","title":{"rendered":"Cells Put a Price Tag on Sensing Their World"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/cells-put-a-price-tag-on-sensing-their-world2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A new model shows how cells could optimize biochemical sensing by balancing information gained against energy spent.<\/p>\n<p>A cell never senses its environment directly. Instead, it receives a noisy stream of molecular cues\u2014chemical markers binding to receptors, enzymes switching states, and messenger molecules appearing and disappearing. Extracting a meaningful signal from these fluctuations can improve survival, but doing so comes at a cost. Maintaining chemical currents and producing readout molecules consume energy. Giorgio Nicoletti of the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical <i>Physics<\/i> in Italy and his colleagues now show how achieving optimal sensing performance requires a balance between gained information and spent energy [1]. Their key idea is to formulate this balance in terms of quantities that can be estimated from statistical observations rather than from hard-to-measure microscopic forces.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new model shows how cells could optimize biochemical sensing by balancing information gained against energy spent. A cell never senses its environment directly. Instead, it receives a noisy stream of molecular cues\u2014chemical markers binding to receptors, enzymes switching states, and messenger molecules appearing and disappearing. Extracting a meaningful signal from these fluctuations can improve [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,1497],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244086"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244086\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}