Nonequilibrium cooperative sensing

While cellular sensing relies on both cooperation between receptors and energy consumption to suppress noise, their combined effect is not well understood. Here we introduce a minimal model of interacting sensors which allows for the detailed exploration of signal statistics and cooperation strategies in the context of optimal sensing. For two sensors we show that the sensing strategy which maximizes the mutual information between the signal and the sensors depends both on the noise level and the statistics of the signals. For signals on a single sensor, nonequilibrium, asymmetric couplings result in maximum information gain in the noise-dominated limit while for joint, correlated signals, the improvement is greatest in the low-noise limit. In particular we show that optimal sensing does not always require energy consumption. We detail the difference in mechanism behind nonequilibrium improvement for univariate and correlated signals and our results provide insight into the principles of optimal sensor design.