Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 105, Issue 49, Pages 19270-19275Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0804702105
Keywords
chemotaxis; motility
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Funding
- National Institutes of Health [P01 GM078586]
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Chemotactic eukaryotic cells are able to detect chemoattractant gradients that are both shallow and have a low background concentration. Under these conditions, the noise in the number of bound receptors can be significant and needs to be taken into account in determining the directional sensing process. Here, we quantify numerically the number of bound receptors on the membrane of a disk-shaped cell by using a numerical Monte Carlo tool. The obtained time traces of the receptor occupancy can be used as inputs for any directional sensing model. We investigate the response of the local excitation global inhibition model and a recently developed balanced inactivation model. We determine a measure for the motility of the cell for each model, based on the relevant output variable, as a function of experimental parameters, resulting in several experimentally testable predictions. Furthermore, we show that these two models behave in a qualitatively different fashion when the background concentration is varied. Thus, to properly characterize the sensitivity of cells to receptor occupancy, it is not sufficient to examine the input signal. Rather, one needs to take into account the response of the second messenger pathway.
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