Directional sensing of deformed cells under faint gradients

Abstract

We consider the physical limit of the directional sensing ability of living cells, as in chemotaxis, under a low concentration and shallow chemoattractant gradient. Elliptic cells sense the direction, which is a stochastic variable of a characteristic distribution with peaks at directions not necessarily to the gradient. The peak positions depend on the information of the gradient that cells use to infer the direction and also the shape and orientation of cells. Cells of different shapes may use different inference strategies to increase their directional sensing performance. © 2012 Published by the American Physical Society.