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Updated: Jul 4, 2026

Tracking Sugar-Elicited Local Searching Behavior in Drosophila
Published on: November 17, 2023
Search along persistent random walks
1Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, 01187 Dresden, Germany.
Abstract:
Optimal search strategies and their implementations in biological systems are a subject of active research. Here we study a search problem which is motivated by the hunt of sperm cells for the egg. We ask for the probability for an active swimmer to find a target under the condition that the swimmer starts at a certain distance from the target. We find that success probability is maximal for a certain level of fluctuations characterized by the persistence length of the swimming path of the swimmer. We derive a scaling law for the optimal persistence length as a function of the initial target distance and search time by mapping the search on a polymer physics problem.
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