Related papers: Protein connectivity in chemotaxis receptor comple…

Intracellular signaling often arises from ligand-induced oligomerization of cell surface receptors. This oligomerization or clustering process is fundamentally a cooperative behavior between near-neighbor receptor molecules; the properties…

In contexts ranging from embryonic development to bacterial ecology, cell populations migrate chemotactically along self-generated chemical gradients, often forming a propagating front. Here, we theoretically show that the stability of such…

Recently there has been a lot of interest in identifying modules at the level of genetic and metabolic networks of organisms, as well as in identifying single genes and reactions that are essential for the organism. A goal of computational…

Organisms must acquire and use environmental information to guide their behaviors. However, it is unclear whether and how information quantitatively limits behavioral performance. Here, we relate information to behavioral performance in…

Microorganisms like bacteria can sense concentration of chemo-attractants in its medium very accurately. They achieve this through interaction between the receptors on their cell surface and the chemo-attractant molecules (like sugar). But…

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…

Motile bacteria can migrate along chemical gradients in a process known as chemotaxis. When exposed to uniform environmental stress, Escherichia coli cells coordinate their chemotactic responses to form millimeter-sized condensates…

Living cells often need to measure chemical concentrations that vary in time. To this end, they deploy many resources, e.g. receptors, downstream signaling molecules, time and energy. Here, we present a theory for the optimal design of a…

In color vision, the quantitative rules for mixing lights to make a target color are well understood. By contrast, the rules for mixing odorants to make a target odor remain elusive. A solution to this problem in vision relied on…

Enzymes show two distinct transport behaviors in the presence of their substrates in solution. First, their diffusivity enhances with increasing substrate concentration. In addition, enzymes perform directional motion toward regions with…

A common feature of biological self-organization is how active agents communicate with each other or their environment via chemical signaling. Such communications, mediated by self-generated chemical gradients, have consequences for both…

Colonies of bacteria grown on thin agar plate exhibit fractal patterns as a result of adaptation to their environments. The bacterial colony pattern formation is regulated crucially by chemotaxis, the movement of cells along a chemical…

Bacterial sensor systems can be used for the detection and measurement of molecular signal concentrations. The dynamics of the sensor directly depend on the biological properties of the bacterial sensor cells; manipulation of these features…

Cell adhesion proteins typically form stable clusters that anchor the cell membrane to its environment. Several works have suggested that cell membrane protein clusters can emerge from a local feedback between the membrane curvature and the…

Cells measure concentrations of external ligands by capturing ligand molecules with cell surface receptors. The numbers of molecules captured by different receptors co-vary because they depend on the same extrinsic ligand fluctuations.…

Microbial communities play a significant role in bioremediation,plant growth,human and animal digestion,global elemental cycles including the carbon-cycle,and water treatment.They are also posed to be the engines of renewable energy via…

We develop a simple, chemostat-based model illustrating how a process analogous to associative learning can occur in a biochemical network. Associative learning is a form of learning whereby a system "learns" to associate two stimuli with…

Chemotaxis, i.e. motion generated by chemical gradients, is a motility mode shared by many living species that has been developed by evolution to optimize certain biological processes such as foraging or immune response. In particular,…

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…

Many chemotactic bacteria inhabit environments in which chemicals appear as localized pulses and evolve by processes such as diffusion and mixing. We show that, in such environments, physical limits on the accuracy of temporal gradient…