On a Condition for Intracellular Adaptive Dynamics for Chemotaxis

TL;DR

This paper investigates the validity of a proposed timescale condition for intracellular adaptive dynamics in microbial chemotaxis, confirming its applicability across various models and environmental conditions through numerical analysis.

Contribution

It provides a numerical validation of the timescale condition for chemotaxis proposed by Oosawa and Nakaoka across different models and environments.

Findings

The condition holds for various environments.

It applies to both short- and long-term behaviors.

Renormalized timescales confirm the condition's validity.

Abstract

Microorganisms often perform chemotaxis, (i.e., sensing and moving toward a region with a higher concentration of an attractive chemical) by changing the rate of tumbling for random walk. We studied several models with internal adaptive dynamics numerically to examine the validity of the condition for chemotaxis proposed by Oosawa and Nakaoka, which states that the time scale of tumbling frequency is smaller than that of adaptation and greater than that of sensing. Suitably renormalizing the timescales showed that the condition holds for a variety of environments and for both short- and long-term behavior.