Related papers: Robust chemotaxis beyond sensing limits: signal, n…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Run-and-tumble chemotaxis is one of the representative search strategies of an odor source via sensing its spatial gradient. The optimal ways of sensing and control in the run-and-tumble chemotaxis have been analyzed theoretically to…
{\sl Escherichia coli} ({\sl E. coli}) bacteria govern their trajectories by switching between running and tumbling modes as a function of the nutrient concentration they experienced in the past. At short time one observes a drift of the…
Unraveling bacterial strategies for spatial exploration is crucial for understanding the complexity in the organization of life. Bacterial motility determines the spatio-temporal structure of microbial communities, controls infection…
Through evolution, bacteria have developed the ability to perform chemotactic motion in order to find nourishment. By adopting a machine learning approach, we aim to understand how this behavior arises. We consider run-and-tumble agents…
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…
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…
The chemotactic network of Escherichia coli has been studied extensively both biophysically and information-theoretically. Nevertheless, the connection between these two aspects is still elusive. In this work, we report such a connection by…
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…
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…
Cells are often considered input-output devices that maximize the transmission of information by converting extracellular stimuli (input) via signaling pathways (communication channel) to cell behavior (output). However, in biological…
Inputs to signaling pathways can have complex statistics that depend on the environment and on the behavioral response to previous stimuli. Such behavioral feedback is particularly important in navigation. Successful navigation relies on…
Extending the classic works of Berg and Purcell on the biophysics of bacterial chemotaxis, we find the optimal chemotactic strategy for the peritrichous bacterium E. Coli in the high and low signal to noise ratio limits. The optimal…
Bacteria track chemical gradients using a biased random walk, a process called chemotaxis. Experiments suggest that bacteria also communicate during this process. Using a mathematical model, we find that sufficiently strong communication…
We investigate the boundary between chemotaxis driven by spatial estimation of gradients and chemotaxis driven by temporal estimation. While it is well known that spatial chemotaxis becomes disadvantageous for small organisms at high noise…