Mathematical Modelling and Analysis of Fractional Diffusion Induced by Intracellular Noise

TL;DR

This paper models how intracellular noise in E. coli leads to Levy-type long jumps, using biologically meaningful pathways, and rigorously derives a fractional diffusion equation from the kinetic model.

Contribution

It introduces a biologically realistic kinetic model for intracellular noise-induced long jumps and derives the fractional diffusion limit analytically and numerically.

Findings

Power-law decay of run length observed in simulations

Numerical results match analytical decay rates

Fractional diffusion equation derived as a limit

Abstract

In this paper we use an individual-based model and its associated kinetic equation to study the generation of long jumps in the motion of E. coli. These models relate the run-and-tumble process to the intracellular reaction where the intrinsic noise plays a central role. Compared with the previous work in [13] in which the parametric assumptions are mainly for mathematical convenience and not well-suited for either numerical simulation or comparison with experimental results, our current paper make use of biologically meaningful pathways and tumbling kernels. Moreover, using the individual-based model we can now perform numerical simulations. Power-law decay of the run length, which corresponds to Levy-type motions, are observed in our numerical results. The particular decay rate agrees quantitatively with the analytical result. We also rigorously recover the fractional diffusion equation as the limit of the kinetic model.