title: Phenomenological approach to eukaryotic chemotactic efficiency.
abstract: Eukaryotic cells are capable of detecting small chemical gradients for a wide range of background concentrations. Ultimately, fluctuations place a limit on gradient sensing and recent work has focused on the role of stochastic receptor occupancy as one possible limiting factor. Here, we use a phenomenological approach to add spontaneous motility fluctuations to receptor noise and predict the directional statistics of eukaryotic chemotaxis. Specifically, an Itô diffusion equation with direction-dependent multiplicative noise is developed and analytically studied. We show that our approach can naturally accommodate recent experimental data for the chemotaxis of the social amoeba Dictyostelium.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, University of California-San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093-0374, USA.
authors.forename: Bo
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.forename: Danny
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Fuller
authors.forename: William F
authors.initials: WF
authors.lastname: Loomis
authors.forename: Herbert
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Levine
authors.forename: Wouter-Jan
authors.initials: WJ
authors.lastname: Rappel
mesh_terms: D002633:Chemotaxis / Q000502:physiology*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004023:Dictyostelium / Q000502:physiology*; D005057:Eukaryotic Cells / Q000502:physiology*; D008954:Models, Biological