Perspective on Interdisciplinary Approaches on Chemotaxis
Abstract
Abstract Most living things on Earth – from bacteria to humans – must migrate in some way to find favourable conditions. Therefore, they nearly all use chemotaxis, in which their movement is steered by a gradient of chemicals. Chemotaxis is fundamental to many processes that control our well‐being, including inflammation, neuronal patterning, wound healing, tumour spread in cancer, even embryogenesis. Understanding it is a key goal for biologists. Despite the fact that many basic principles appear to have been conserved throughout evolution, most research has focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms that control signal processing and locomotion. Cell signaling – cells responding to time‐varying external signals – underlies almost all biological processes at the cellular scale. Chemotaxis of single cells provides particularly amenable model systems for quantitative cell signaling studies, even in the presence of noise and fluctuations, because the output, the cell's motility response, is directly observable. However, the different scientific disciplines involved in chemotaxis research rarely overlap, so biologists, physicists and mathematicians interact far too infrequently, methodologies and models differ and commonalities are often overlooked, such as the possible influence of physical or environmental conditions, which has been largely neglected.
Article Details
Authors (19)
Juliane Simmchen
Faculty of Science University of Strathclyde Glasgow G11XL UK
Daniel Gordon
Faculty of Science University of Strathclyde Glasgow G11XL UK
John MacKenzie
Faculty of Science University of Strathclyde Glasgow G11XL UK
Ignacio Pagonabarraga
Universitat de Barcelona Institute of Complex Systems Universitat de Barcelona Barcelona 08028 Spain
Christina C. Roggatz
Faculty of Biology and Chemistry UFT Center for Environmental Research and Sustainable Technology University of Bremen Bremen Germany
Robert G. Endres
Department of Life Sciences and Centre for Integrative Systems Biology and Bioinformatics
Zuyao Xiao
Physical Chemistry Technische Universität Dresden 01069 Dresden Germany
Benjamin M. Friedrich
Cluster of Excellence ‘Physics of Life’
Tian Qiu
Department of Chemical and Systems Biology, ChEM-H and Stanford Cancer Institute, Stanford Medical School
Kevin J. Painter
DIST (Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning) Politecnico di Torino Italy Milano Italy
Ramin Golestanian
Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS) 1 , 37077 Göttingen,
Claudia Contini
Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London
Mehmet Can Uçar
Institute of Science and Technology Austria
Gilad Yossifon
Jens Uwe Sommer
Division Theory of Polymers Leibniz Insitute of Polymer Research 01069 Dresden Germany
Wouter‐Jan Rappel
Department of Physics University of California San Diego La Jolla CA 92093 USA
Kirsty Y. Wan
Living Systems Institute
Judith Armitage
Department of Biochemistry University of Oxford South Parks Road Oxford OX1 3QU UK
Robert Insall
Department of Cell & Developmental Biology University College London London WC1E 6BT UK