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Optimal chemotactic responses in stochastic environments

Godány, M; Khatri, BS; Goldstein, RA; (2017) Optimal chemotactic responses in stochastic environments. PLoS One , 12 (6) , Article e0179111. 10.1371/journal.pone.0179111. Green open access

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Abstract

Although the "adaptive" strategy used by Escherichia coli has dominated our understanding of bacterial chemotaxis, the environmental conditions under which this strategy emerged is still poorly understood. In this work, we study the performance of various chemotactic strategies under a range of stochastic time- and space-varying attractant distributions in silico. We describe a novel "speculator" response in which the bacterium compare the current attractant concentration to the long-term average; if it is higher then they tumble persistently, while if it is lower than the average, bacteria swim away in search of more favorable conditions. We demonstrate how this response explains the experimental behavior of aerobically-grown Rhodobacter sphaeroides and that under spatially complex but slowly-changing nutrient conditions the speculator response is as effective as the adaptive strategy of E. coli.

Type: Article
Title: Optimal chemotactic responses in stochastic environments
Location: United States
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0179111
Publisher version: http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0179111
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright: © 2017 Godány et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Medical Sciences > Div of Infection and Immunity
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1561083
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