Chemotaxing E. coli do not count single molecules.

Understanding biological functions requires identifying the physical limits and system-specific constraints that have shaped them. In Escherichia coli chemotaxis, gradient-climbing speed is information-limited, bounded by the sensory information they acquire from real-time measurements of their environment. However, it remains unclear what limits this information. Past work conjectured that E. coli's chemosensing is limited by the physics of molecule arrivals at their sensors. Here, we derive the physical limit on behaviorally-relevant information, and then perform single-cell experiments to quantify how much information E. coli's signaling pathway encodes. We find that E. coli encode two orders of magnitude less information than the physical limit due to their stochastic signal processing. Thus, system-specific constraints, rather than the physical limit, have shaped the evolution of this canonical sensory-motor behavior.