Related Experiment Video
Updated: Mar 30, 2026

Generating Controlled, Dynamic Chemical Landscapes to Study Microbial Behavior
Published on: January 31, 2020
Reaction enhancement by flux-limited chemotaxis
Jing An1, Alexander Kiselev2, Yao Yao3
1School of Mathematical Sciences, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China. jingan1009@sjtu.edu.cn.
None:
Chemotaxis plays a crucial role in a variety of processes in biology and ecology. Quite often it acts to improve efficiency of biological reactions; one example is the immune system signalling, where infected tissues release chemokines attracting monocytes to fight invading bacteria. Another example is reproduction, where eggs release pheromones that attract sperm. In this paper, we analyze a system of two reacting densities, one of which is chemotactic on another. Since the speed of any biological agents is limited, we employ flux limited chemotaxis model. Our main result is the rigorous derivation of the scaling laws showing how presence of chemotaxis affects the typical reaction time scale in two dimensions. This work builds on the results of Kiselev et al. J. Eur. Math. Soc., 25 (2023), no. 7, 2641-2696., which employed as a classical Keller-Segel chemotaxis term (not flux limited) - leading to the effect of possible over concentration and restricting the results to radial data. The model presented here is more reasonable biologically and covers broader parameter regimes.
Related Concept Videos
Chemotaxis in E. coli
Chemotaxis and Direction of Cell Migration
Reaction Mechanisms: Rate-limiting Step Approximation
Protein Dynamics in Living Cells
Fluorescent recovery after photobleaching (FRAP) is a fluorescent-protein-based detection technique used to quantify protein movement rates within the cell. This method exposes a small portion of the cell to an intense laser beam. The laser beam causes permanent photobleaching of the fluorophore-tagged proteins in the exposed region. As the bleached...

