PMID:22144882
| Citation |
Chatterjee, S, da Silveira, RA and Kafri, Y (2011) Chemotaxis when bacteria remember: drift versus diffusion. PLoS Comput. Biol. 7:e1002283 |
|---|---|
| Abstract |
Escherichia coli (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 bacterial population, while at long time one observes accumulation in high-nutrient regions. Recent work has viewed chemotaxis as a compromise between drift toward favorable regions and accumulation in favorable regions. A number of earlier studies assume that a bacterium resets its memory at tumbles - a fact not borne out by experiment - and make use of approximate coarse-grained descriptions. Here, we revisit the problem of chemotaxis without resorting to any memory resets. We find that when bacteria respond to the environment in a non-adaptive manner, chemotaxis is generally dominated by diffusion, whereas when bacteria respond in an adaptive manner, chemotaxis is dominated by a bias in the motion. In the adaptive case, favorable drift occurs together with favorable accumulation. We derive our results from detailed simulations and a variety of analytical arguments. In particular, we introduce a new coarse-grained description of chemotaxis as biased diffusion, and we discuss the way it departs from older coarse-grained descriptions. |
| Links |
PubMed PMC3228785 Online version:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002283 |
| Keywords |
Algorithms; Bacterial Physiological Phenomena; Chemotaxis/physiology; Computational Biology; Computer Simulation; Diffusion; Escherichia coli/physiology; Models, Biological |
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