I want to use sensors on an Arduino to control values in a MATLAB program. What are my options for communicating?

I've used Processing to receive data sent via the serial cable, and that strategy has worked pretty well. Is there something similar I can do using MATLAB? I'm somewhat new to MATLAB, so gentle guidance would be great.

I'm not really looking for something like the ArduinoIO package -- I want to have separate computation executing on the Arduino and occasionally informing my MATLAB program (which will occasionally poll the serial line, I suppose).