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Published on: August 27, 2019
Directional sensing of deformed cells under faint gradients
Akinori Baba1, Tetsuya Hiraiwa, Tatsuo Shibata
1Laboratories for Physical Biology, RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology, 2-2-3 Minatojima-minamimachi, Chuo-ku, Kobe 650-0047, Japan.
Abstract:
We consider the physical limit of the directional sensing ability of living cells, as in chemotaxis, under a low concentration and shallow chemoattractant gradient. Elliptic cells sense the direction, which is a stochastic variable of a characteristic distribution with peaks at directions not necessarily to the gradient. The peak positions depend on the information of the gradient that cells use to infer the direction and also the shape and orientation of cells. Cells of different shapes may use different inference strategies to increase their directional sensing performance.

