University of California San Diego, Department of Physics, La Jolla, CA 92093 USA.
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Strada Costiera 11, I-34014 Trieste, Italy.
Curr Opin Microbiol. 2018 Oct;45:16-21. doi: 10.1016/j.mib.2018.01.010. Epub 2018 Feb 13.
Bacterial chemotaxis is a classical subject: our knowledge of its molecular pathway has grown very detailed, and experimental observations, as well as mathematical models of the dynamics of chemotactic populations, have a history of several decades. This should not lead to the conclusion that only minor details are left to be understood. Indeed, it is believed that bacterial chemotaxis is under selection for efficiency, yet the underlying functional forces remain largely unknown. These aspects are discussed here by the presentation of illustrative examples related to the role of adaptation and signal integration. Both are expected to be important in ecologically relevant conditions, where chemotaxis should be strongly coupled with metabolism and growth, due to the presence of diverse chemoattractant cues and their active consumption by multiple types of bacteria competing for growth.
我们对其分子途径的了解已经非常详细，并且关于趋化群体动力学的实验观察和数学模型都已经有几十年的历史了。这不应导致这样的结论，即只有一些较小的细节尚待理解。事实上，人们认为细菌趋化性是在效率选择的作用下进化的，但潜在的功能力量在很大程度上仍然未知。通过介绍与适应和信号整合作用相关的说明性例子，在这里对这些方面进行了讨论。由于存在多种化学引诱物线索以及多种细菌为了生长而积极地消耗它们，因此在生态相关的条件下，代谢和生长应该与趋化性紧密结合，这两个方面都被认为是很重要的。
