ArticlePLoS computational biology2018
Decision making improves sperm chemotaxis in the presence of noise.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- A Two-State Random Walk Model of Sperm Search on Confined Domains.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Modeling diffusive search by non-adaptive sperm: Empirical and computational insights.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Reinforcement learning of biomimetic navigation: a model problem for sperm chemotaxis.The European physical journal. E, Soft matter · 2024Article
- In Silico Reconstruction of Sperm Chemotaxis.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Article
- Sperm migration in the genital tract-In silico experiments identify key factors for reproductive success.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Sperm chemotaxis in marine species is optimal at physiological flow rates according theory of filament surfing.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Origins of eukaryotic excitability.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Article
- Bacteria push the limits of chemotactic precision to navigate dynamic chemical gradients.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Olfactory Navigation and the Receptor Nonlinearity.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
To navigate their surroundings, cells rely on sensory input that is corrupted by noise. In cells performing chemotaxis, such noise arises from the stochastic binding of signalling molecules at low chemoattractant concentrations. We reveal a fundamental relationship between the speed of chemotactic steering and the strength of directional fluctuations that result from the amplification of noise in a chemical input signal. This relation implies a trade-off between steering that is slow and reliable, and steering that is fast but less reliable. We show that dynamic switching between these two modes of steering can substantially increase the probability to find a target, such as an egg to be found by sperm cells. This decision making confers no advantage in the absence of noise, but is beneficial when chemical signals are detectable, yet characterized by low signal-to-noise ratios. The latter applies at intermediate distances from a target, where signalling molecules are diluted, thus defining a 'noise zone' that cells have to cross. Our results explain decision making observed in recent experiments on sea urchin sperm chemotaxis. More generally, our theory demonstrates how decision making enables chemotactic agents to cope with high levels of noise in gradient sensing by dynamically adjusting the persistence length of a biased random walk.
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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.