Some Biophysics of Chemotaxis

Orateur : Rémy COLIN (Max Plank Institute for terrestrial microbiology, Marburg, Germany)

Chemotaxis is one of the main physiological functions of the motility of microorganisms by which they find their way towards preferred environmental conditions. It is involved in environment colonization and pathogenicity, as well as cell aggregation and biofilm formation. The average chemotactic behavior of an isolated cell is fairly well understood in a model organism like Escherichia coli. Actual environments however feature dense populations where physical interactions might allow for the emergence of collective motilities, and where stochasticity, notably but not only in gene expression, produces behavioral heterogeneities. In this seminar, I will present a couple of works, combining experiments and numerical simulations, where we used the tools of statistical physics to address on the one end the effect of collective motility on chemotactic navigation, and on the other end the origins of chemotaxis pathway activity fluctuations, both in the E. coli model system.

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