Related papers: Bacterial chemotaxis without gradient-sensing

Bacteria are often exposed to multiple stimuli in complex environments, and their efficient chemotactic decisions are critical to survive and grow in their native environments. Bacterial responses to the environmental stimuli depend on the…

Bacterial chemotaxis has long been viewed as operating near the physical limits of sensing, as originally articulated by Berg and Purcell. Recent information-theoretic analyses challenge this view, suggesting that Escherichia coli uses only…

Self-generated gradients (SGG) provide robust steering cues that guide cells in their long-distance expeditions during embryonic development, immune response, and cancer metastasis. Cells generate their own local, dynamic gradients by…

Bacterial motility, and in particular repulsion or attraction towards specific chemicals, has been a subject of investigation for over 100 years, resulting in detailed understanding of bacterial chemotaxis and the corresponding sensory…

Eukaryotic cells are able to sense chemical gradients in a wide range of environments. We show that, if a cell is exposed to a highly variable environment, it may gain chemotactic accuracy by expressing multiple receptor types with varying…

A simulation approach to the stochastic growth of bacterial towers is presented, in which a non-uniform and finite nutrient supply essentially determines the emerging structure through elementary chemotaxis. The method is based on cellular…

Ephemeral aggregations of bacteria are ubiquitous in the environment, where they serve as hotbeds of metabolic activity, nutrient cycling, and horizontal gene transfer. In many cases, these regions of high bacterial concentration are…

We compare chemotaxis, the migration of cells and higher animals in reaction to a chemical stimulus, and similar phenomena originating within gases from temperature differences. Then we explain two easy mathematical models for handling…

Animal cells can sense chemical gradients without moving, and are faced with the challenge of migrating towards a target despite noisy information on the target position. Here we discuss optimal search strategies for a chaser that moves by…

Chemotactic cells of eukaryotic organisms are able to accurately sense shallow chemical concentration gradients using cell-surface receptors. This sensing ability is remarkable as cells must be able to spatially resolve small fractional…

Microorganisms often perform chemotaxis, (i.e., sensing and moving toward a region with a higher concentration of an attractive chemical) by changing the rate of tumbling for random walk. We studied several models with internal adaptive…

Autologous chemotaxis is the process in which cells secrete and detect molecules to determine the direction of fluid flow. Experiments and theory suggest that autologous chemotaxis fails at high cell densities because molecules from other…

Organisms use specialized sensors to measure their environments, but the fundamental principles that determine their accuracy remain largely unknown. In Escherichia coli chemotaxis, we previously found that gradient-climbing speed is…

We formulate the Smoluchowski equation for a run-and-tumble particle. It includes the mean tumble rate in a chemical field, for which we derive a Markovian response theory. Using a multipole expansion and a reaction-diffusion equation for…

Chemotaxis is a ubiquitous biological phenomenon in which cells detect a spatial gradient of chemoattractant, and then move towards the source. Here we present a position-dependent advection-diffusion model that quantitatively describes the…

Bacterial chemotaxis in Escherichia coli is a canonical system for the study of signal transduction. A remarkable feature of this system is the coexistence of precise adaptation in population with large fluctuating cellular behavior in…

In nature, microorganisms must often cope with hostile environmental conditions. To do so they have developed sophisticated cooperative behavior and intricate communication capabilities, such as: direct cell-cell physical interactions via…

We introduce a generic, purely mechanical model for environment sensitive motion of mammalian cells that is applicable to chemotaxis, haptotaxis, and durotaxis as modes of motility. It is able to theoretically explain all relevant…

A discrete chemotactic predator-prey model is proposed in which the prey secrets a diffusing chemical which is sensed by the predator and vice versa. Two dynamical states corresponding to catching and escaping are identified and it is shown…

Chemotaxis systems of Keller--Segel type constitute one of the central mathematical frameworks for understanding aggregation phenomena in biological and ecological systems. Over the past decades, the theory has evolved from the classical…