English

Stochastic dynamics of chemotactic colonies with logistic growth

Statistical Mechanics 2022-03-30 v2 Biological Physics

Abstract

The interplay between cellular growth and cell-cell signaling is essential for the aggregation and proliferation of bacterial colonies, as well as for the self-organization of cell tissues. To investigate this interplay, we focus here on the collective properties of dividing chemotactic cell colonies by studying their long-time and large-scale dynamics through a renormalization group (RG) approach. The RG analysis reveals that a relevant but unconventional chemotactic interaction -- corresponding to a polarity-induced mechanism -- is generated by fluctuations at macroscopic scales, even when an underlying mechanism is absent at the microscopic level. This emerges from the interplay of the well-known Keller--Segel (KS) chemotactic nonlinearity and cell birth and death processes. At one-loop order, we find no stable fixed point of the RG flow equations. We discuss a connection between the dynamics investigated here and the celebrated Kardar--Parisi--Zhang (KPZ) equation with long-range correlated noise, which points at the existence of a strong-coupling, nonperturbative fixed point.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2111.08508,
  title  = {Stochastic dynamics of chemotactic colonies with logistic growth},
  author = {Riccardo Ben Alì Zinati and Charlie Duclut and Saeed Mahdisoltani and Andrea Gambassi and Ramin Golestanian},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.08508},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

The first three authors contributed equally. Typos corrected