ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2010
External and internal constraints on eukaryotic chemotaxis.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 68 papers.
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Who cites it
68 citing papers in PubMed, 149 citations in OpenAlex.
- Positional information and information flows in dynamic tissues.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Competing chemical gradients change chemotactic dynamics and cell distribution.Physical review. E · 2026Article
- Information bounds on the accuracy of cell polarization.PloS one · 2025Article
- Article
- Dynamic cluster field modeling of collective chemotaxis.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Trade-offs in concentration sensing in dynamic environments.Biophysical journal · 2024Article
- Cells function as a ternary logic gate to decide migration direction under integrated chemical and fluidic cues.Lab on a chip · 2023Article
- MACC1-induced migration in tumors: Current state and perspective.Frontiers in oncology · 2023Review
- Close to Optimal Cell Sensing Ensures the Robustness of Tissue Differentiation Process: The Avian Photoreceptor Mosaic Case.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Cell dispersal by localized degradation of a chemoattractant.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- SCHEEPDOG: Programming Electric Cues to Dynamically Herd Large-Scale Cell Migration.Cell systems · 2020Article
- A negative-feedback loop maintains optimal chemokine concentrations for directional cell migration.Nature cell biology · 2020Article
- Article
- Chemotaxis Model for Breast Cancer Cells Based on Signal/Noise Ratio.Biophysical journal · 2018Article
- Collective gradient sensing and chemotaxis: modeling and recent developments.Journal of physics. Condensed matter : an Institute of Physics journal · 2018Review
- Adaptation of Living Systems.Annual review of condensed matter physics · 2018Article
- A computational model for how cells choose temporal or spatial sensing during chemotaxis.PLoS computational biology · 2018Article
- Cell-to-cell variation sets a tissue-rheology-dependent bound on collective gradient sensing.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Discrete Modeling of Amoeboid Locomotion and Chemotaxis in Dictyostelium discoideum by Tracking Pseudopodium Growth Direction.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Mechanisms of Cell Polarization.Current opinion in systems biology · 2017Article
8 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Chemotaxis, the chemically guided movement of cells, plays an important role in several biological processes including cancer, wound healing, and embryogenesis. Chemotacting cells are able to sense shallow chemical gradients where the concentration of chemoattractant differs by only a few percent from one side of the cell to the other, over a wide range of local concentrations. Exactly what limits the chemotactic ability of these cells is presently unclear. Here we determine the chemotactic response of Dictyostelium cells to exponential gradients of varying steepness and local concentration of the chemoattractant cAMP. We find that the cells are sensitive to the steepness of the gradient as well as to the local concentration. Using information theory techniques, we derive a formula for the mutual information between the input gradient and the spatial distribution of bound receptors and also compute the mutual information between the input gradient and the motility direction in the experiments. A comparison between these quantities reveals that for shallow gradients, in which the concentration difference between the back and the front of a 10-mum-diameter cell is <5%, and for small local concentrations (<10 nM) the intracellular information loss is insignificant. Thus, external fluctuations due to the finite number of receptors dominate and limit the chemotactic response. For steeper gradients and higher local concentrations, the intracellular information processing is suboptimal and results in a smaller mutual information between the input gradient and the motility direction than would have been predicted from the ligand-receptor binding process.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.