Related papers: Chemotaxing E. coli do not count single molecules
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…
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…
Navigation of microorganisms is controlled by internal processes ultimately sensitive to mechanical or chemical signaling encountered along the path. In many natural environments, such as porous soils or physiological ducts, motile species…
Cells encounter a diverse array of physical and chemical signals as they navigate their natural surroundings. However, their response to the simultaneous presence of multiple cues remains elusive. Particularly, the impact of topography…
Proliferation is a defining feature of life. Through growth, division, and death, living systems consume energy and inject mass, breaking conservation laws and driving collective phenomena from biofilm formation to embryonic development.…
Elucidating the architecture and dynamics of large scale genetic regulatory networks of cells is an important goal in systems biology. We study the system level dynamical properties of the genetic network of Escherichia coli that regulates…
Single eukaryotic cells commonly sense and follow chemical gradients, performing chemotaxis. Recent experiments and theories, however, show that even when single cells do not chemotax, clusters of cells may, if their interactions are…
Understanding how bacteria move in porous media is critical to applications in healthcare, agriculture, environmental remediation, and chemical sensing. Recent work has demonstrated that E. coli, which moves by run-and-tumble dynamics in a…
Cells continuously sense their surroundings to detect modifications and generate responses. Very often changes in extracellular concentrations initiate signaling cascades that eventually result in changes in gene expression. Increasing…
Biological cells sense external chemical stimuli in their environment using cell-surface receptors. To increase the sensitivity of sensing, receptors often cluster, most noticeably in bacterial chemotaxis, a paradigm for signaling and…
Collective migration -- the directed, coordinated motion of many self-propelled agents -- is a fascinating emergent behavior exhibited by active matter that has key functional implications for biological systems. Extensive studies have…
We study a modified version of an initial-boundary value problem describing the formation of colony patterns of bacteria \textit{Escherichia Coli}. The original system of three parabolic equations was studied numerically and analytically…
Cells rely on the ability to sense and respond to small spatial differences in chemoattractant concentrations for survival. There is growing evidence that this is accomplished by setting the signaling system near the threshold for…
Computation of biological processes creates great promise for everyday life and great challenges for physical scientists. Simulations of molecular dynamics appeal to biologists as a natural extension of structural biology. Once biologists…
Collective cell migration in response to a chemical cue occurs in many biological processes such as morphogenesis and cancer metastasis. Clusters of migratory cells in these systems are capable of responding to gradients of less than 1%…
In the chemotactic motion of Escherichia coli, the switching of transmembrane chemoreceptors between active and inactive states is one of the most important steps of the signaling pathway. We study the effect of this switching time-scale on…
Run-and-tumble motility is widely used by swimming microorganisms including numerous prokaryotic eukaryotic organisms. Here, we experimentally investigate the run-and-tumble dynamics of the bacterium E. coli in polymeric solutions. We find…
Living cells can leverage correlations in environmental fluctuations to predict the future environment and mount a response ahead of time. To this end, cells need to encode the past signal into the output of the intracellular network from…
Here we characterized an information measure for cell polarity that applies to non-motile cells responding to a chemical gradient. The central idea is that polarization represents information about the direction of the gradient. We applied…
The signaling apparatus mediating bacterial chemotaxis can adapt to a wide range of persistent external stimuli. In many cases, the bacterial activity returns to its pre-stimulus level exactly and this "perfect adaptability" is robust…