Romanczuk P, Salbreux G
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, New Jersey 80544, USA.
Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Nöthnitzerstr. 38, 01187 Dresden, Germany.
Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2015 Apr;91(4):042720. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.91.042720. Epub 2015 Apr 30.
Animal cells can sense chemical gradients without moving and are faced with the challenge of migrating towards a target despite noisy information on the target position. Here we discuss optimal search strategies for a chaser that moves by switching between two phases of motion ("run" and "tumble"), reorienting itself towards the target during tumble phases, and performing persistent migration during run phases. We show that the chaser average run time can be adjusted to minimize the target catching time or the spatial dispersion of the chasers. We obtain analytical results for the catching time and for the spatial dispersion in the limits of small and large ratios of run time to tumble time and scaling laws for the optimal run times. Our findings have implications for optimal chemotactic strategies in animal cell migration.
动物细胞能够在不移动的情况下感知化学梯度，并且面临着尽管关于目标位置的信息存在噪声但仍要朝着目标迁移的挑战。在此，我们讨论一种追逐者的最优搜索策略，该追逐者通过在两个运动阶段（“奔跑”和“翻滚”）之间切换来移动，在翻滚阶段重新将自身朝向目标，并在奔跑阶段进行持续迁移。我们表明，追逐者的平均奔跑时间可以进行调整，以最小化目标捕获时间或追逐者的空间扩散。我们获得了在奔跑时间与翻滚时间的小比例和大比例极限情况下的捕获时间和空间扩散的分析结果，以及最优奔跑时间的标度律。我们的发现对动物细胞迁移中的最优趋化策略具有启示意义。
