a stochastic description of dictyostelium chemotaxis盘基网柄菌的随机描述趋化作用.pdfVIP

A Stochastic Description of Dictyostelium Chemotaxis Gabriel Amselem1,2, Matthias Theves 1,3, Albert Bae1,4, Eberhard Bodenschatz1,4,5, Carsten Beta1,3* ¨ 1 Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Gottingen, Germany, 2 School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America, 3 Institute of Physics and Astronomy, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany, 4 Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics, ¨ ¨ Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States of America, 5 Institute for Nonlinear Dynamics, University of Gottingen, Gottingen, Germany Abstract Chemotaxis, the directed motion of a cell toward a chemical source, plays a key role in many essential biological processes. Here, we derive a statistical model that quantitatively describes the chemotactic motion of eukaryotic cells in a chemical gradient. Our model is based on observations of the chemotactic motion of the social ameba Dictyostelium discoideum, a model organism for eukaryotic chemotaxis. A large number of cell trajectories in stationary, linear chemoattractant gradients is measured, using microfluidic tools in combination with automated cell tracking. We describe the directional motion as the interplay between deterministic and stochastic contributions based on a Langevin equation. The functional form of this equation is directly extracted from experimental data by angle-resolved conditional averages. It contains quadratic deterministic damping and multiplicative noise. In the presence of an external gradient, the deterministic part shows a clear angular dependence that takes the form of a force pointing in