Journal
PLOS COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY
Volume 6, Issue 12, Pages -Publisher
PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1001004
Keywords
-
Funding
- EPSRC
- Programa Nacional de Movilidad de Recursos Humanos del MEC-MICINN, Plan I-D+I, Spain
- EUCogII
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Since the pioneering work by Julius Adler in the 1960's, bacterial chemotaxis has been predominantly studied as metabolism-independent. All available simulation models of bacterial chemotaxis endorse this assumption. Recent studies have shown, however, that many metabolism-dependent chemotactic patterns occur in bacteria. We hereby present the simplest artificial protocell model capable of performing metabolism-based chemotaxis. The model serves as a proof of concept to show how even the simplest metabolism can sustain chemotactic patterns of varying sophistication. It also reproduces a set of phenomena that have recently attracted attention on bacterial chemotaxis and provides insights about alternative mechanisms that could instantiate them. We conclude that relaxing the metabolism-independent assumption provides important theoretical advances, forces us to rethink some established pre-conceptions and may help us better understand unexplored and poorly understood aspects of bacterial chemotaxis.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available