Related papers: Is E. coli good at chemotaxis?
Bacteria are prolific at colonizing diverse surfaces under a widerange of environmental conditions, and exhibit fascinating examples of self-organization across scales. Though it has recently attracted considerable interest, the role of…
Escherichia coli has long been a trusty companion, maintaining health in our guts and advancing biological knowledge in the laboratory. In light of recent findings, we discuss multicellular self-organization in E. coli and develop general…
Hybrid models of chemotaxis combine agent-based models of cells with partial differential equation models of extracellular chemical signals. In this paper, travelling wave properties of hybrid models of bacterial chemotaxis are…
Bacterial contamination of biological conducts, catheters or water resources is a major threat to public health and can be amplified by the ability of bacteria to swim upstream. The mechanisms of this rheotaxis, the reorientation with…
Bacterial chemotaxis systems are as diverse as the environments that bacteria inhabit, but how much environmental variation can cells tolerate with a single system? Diversification of a single chemotaxis system could serve as an…
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…
The rotary motor of bacteria is a natural nano-technological marvel that enables cell locomotion by powering the rotation of semi-rigid helical flagellar filaments in fluid environments. It is well known that the motor operates essentially…
Bacterial chemotaxis is controlled by the conformational changes of the receptors, in response to the change of the ambient chemical concentration. In a statistical mechanical approach, the signalling due to the conformational changes is a…
The response of microbes to external signals is mediated by biochemical networks with intrinsic time scales. These time scales give rise to a memory that impacts cellular behaviour. Here we study theoretically the role of cellular memory in…
Chemotaxis and haptotaxis have been a main theme in the macroscopic study of bacterial and cellular motility. In this work we investigate the influence these processes have on the shape and motility of fast migrating cells. We note that…
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 flagellated bacterium Escherichia coli is increasingly used experimentally as a self-propelled swimmer. To obtain meaningful, quantitative results that are comparable between different laboratories, reproducible protocols are needed to…
Escherichia coli is a motile bacterium that moves up a chemoattractant gradient by performing a biased random walk composed of alternating runs and tumbles. Previous models of run and tumble chemotaxis neglect one or more features of the…
Chemotaxis of the bacterium Escherichia coli is well understood in shallow chemical gradients, but its swimming behavior remains difficult to interpret in steep gradients. By focusing on single-cell trajectories from simulations, we…
Bacterial chemotactic sensing converts noisy chemical signals into running and tumbling. We analyze the static sensing limits of mixed Tar/Tsr chemoreceptor clusters in individual Escherichia coli cells using a heterogeneous…
In natural environments, solid surfaces present both opportunities and challenges for bacteria. On one hand, they serve as platforms for biofilm formation, crucial for bacterial colonization and resilience in harsh conditions. On the other…
Chemotaxis is the physical phenomenon that bacteria adjust their motions according to chemical stimulus. A classical model for this phenomenon is a kinetic equation that describes the velocity jump process whose tumbling/transition kernel…
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…
We show how the competition between sensing and adaptation can result in a performance peak in E.coli chemotaxis using extensive numerical simulations in a detailed theoretical model. Receptor clustering amplifies the input signal coming…
Swimming bacteria detect chemical gradients by performing temporal comparisons of recent measurements of chemical concentration. These comparisons are described quantitatively by the chemotactic response function, which we expect to…