ArticleiScience2021
Temporal fluctuations in chemotaxis gain implement a simulated-tempering strategy for efficient navigation in complex environments.
Article in iScience, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Navigating bacterial motility through chemotaxis: from molecular mechanisms to physiological perspectives.Folia microbiologica · 2025Review
- Signal integration and adaptive sensory diversity tuning in Escherichia coli chemotaxis.Cell systems · 2024Article
- Optimal inference of molecular interaction dynamics in FRET microscopy.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- The dopamine circuit as a reward-taxis navigation system.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Multiple functions of flagellar motility and chemotaxis in bacterial physiology.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2021Review
- Non-Genetic Diversity in Chemosensing and Chemotactic Behavior.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Review
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
Bacterial chemotaxis is a major testing ground for systems biology, including the role of fluctuations and individual variation. Individual bacteria vary in their tumbling frequency and adaptation time. Recently, large cell-cell variation was also discovered in chemotaxis gain, which determines the sensitivity of the tumbling rate to attractant gradients. Variation in gain is puzzling, because low gain impairs chemotactic velocity. Here, we provide a functional explanation for gain variation by establishing a formal analogy between chemotaxis and algorithms for sampling probability distributions. We show that temporal fluctuations in gain implement simulated tempering, which allows sampling of attractant distributions with many local peaks. Periods of high gain allow bacteria to detect and climb gradients quickly, and periods of low gain allow them to move to new peaks. Gain fluctuations thus allow bacteria to thrive in complex environments, and more generally they may play an important functional role for organism navigation.
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