Biomixing by chemotaxis and enhancement of biological reactions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how chemotaxis influences biological reactions, demonstrating that chemotaxis can significantly enhance fertilization efficiency, unlike pure advection and diffusion, with implications for understanding coral spawning.

Contribution

It provides the first analytical and numerical analysis of the interaction between chemotaxis and reactions, showing chemotaxis's critical role in boosting fertilization rates.

Findings

Chemotaxis can make fertilization rates arbitrarily close to complete.

Without chemotaxis, fertilization efficiency has a strict upper limit.

Fertilization timescales in chemotactic models are independent of reaction amplitude.

Abstract

Many processes in biology involve both reactions and chemotaxis. However, to the best of our knowledge, the question of interaction between chemotaxis and reactions has not yet been addressed either analytically or numerically. We consider a model with a single density function involving diffusion, advection, chemotaxis, and absorbing reaction. The model is motivated, in particular, by studies of coral broadcast spawning, where experimental observations of the efficiency of fertilization rates significantly exceed the data obtained from numerical models that do not take chemotaxis (attraction of sperm gametes by a chemical secreted by egg gametes) into account. We prove that in the framework of our model, chemotaxis plays a crucial role. There is a rigid limit to how much the fertilization efficiency can be enhanced if there is no chemotaxis but only advection and diffusion. On the other hand, when chemotaxis is present, the fertilization rate can be arbitrarily close to being complete provided that the chemotactic attraction is sufficiently strong. Moreover, an interesting feature of the estimates on fertilization rate and timescales in the chemotactic case is that they do not depend on the amplitude of the reaction term.