Related papers: Chemotaxing E. coli do not count single molecules
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…
Bacteria seem masters of chemotaxis, yet recent work suggests otherwise. Henry Mattingly and colleagues (Nature Physics, 2026) argue that Escherichia coli uses only a small fraction of the sensory information available at its surface,…
Escherichia coli has long been used as a model organism due to the extensive experimental characterization of its pathways and molecular components. Take chemotaxis as an example, which allows bacteria to sense and swim in response to…
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…
Many crucial biological processes operate with surprisingly small numbers of molecules, and there is renewed interest in analyzing the impact of noise associated with these small numbers. Twenty--five years ago, Berg and Purcell showed that…
Flagellated bacteria, such as Escherichia coli, perform directed motion in gradients of concentration of attractants and repellents in a process called chemotaxis. The E. coli chemotaxis signaling pathway is a model for signal transduction,…
Chemotaxis in bacteria such as \textit{E.\ coli} is controlled by the slow methylation of chemoreceptors. As a consequence, intrinsic time and length scales of tens of seconds and hundreds of micrometers emerge, making the Keller--Segel…
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…
It is of great biological interest to understand the molecular origins of chemotactic behavior of E. coli by developing population-level models based on the underlying signaling pathway dynamics. We derive macroscopic models for E.coli…
Two distinct mechanisms for filtering noise in an input signal are identified in a class of adaptive sensory networks. We find that the high frequency noise is filtered by the output degradation process through time-averaging; while the low…
Autologous chemotaxis, in which cells secrete and detect molecules to determine the direction of fluid flow, is thwarted at high cell density because molecules from other cells interfere with a given cell's signal. Using a minimal model of…
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…
To successfully navigate chemical gradients, microorganisms need to predict how the ligand concentration changes in space. Due to their limited size, they do not take a spatial derivative over their body length but rather a temporal…
Noise in transduction of chemotactic stimuli to the flagellar motor of E. coli will affect the random run-and-tumble motion of the cell and the ability to perform chemotaxis. Here we use numerical simulations to show that an intermediate…
Adaptation of the chemotaxis sensory pathway of the bacterium Escherichia coli is integral for detecting chemicals over a wide range of background concentrations, ultimately allowing cells to swim towards sources of attractant and away from…
In response to a concentration gradient of nutrient, E. coli bacterium modulates the rotational bias of flagellar motors which control its run-and-tumble motion, to migrate towards regions of high nutrient concentration. Presence of…
Sensory systems have evolved to respond to input stimuli of certain statistical properties, and to reliably transmit this information through biochemical pathways. Hence, for an experimentally well-characterized sensory system, one ought to…
The chemotaxis pathway in the bacterium Escherichia coli allows cells to detect changes in external ligand concentration (e.g. nutrients). The pathway regulates the flagellated rotary motors and hence the cells' swimming behaviour, steering…
Robustness and sensitivity of responses generated by cell signaling networks has been associated with survival and evolvability of organisms. However, existing methods analyzing robustness and sensitivity of signaling networks ignore the…
We study single cell E.coli chemotaxis in a spatio-temporally varying attractant environment. Modeling the attractant concentration in the form of a traveling sine wave, we measure in our simulations, the chemotactic drift velocity of the…