TY - JOUR
T1 - The threshold of an excitable system serves as a control mechanism for noise filtering during chemotaxis
AU - Bhattacharya, Sayak
AU - Iglesias, Pablo A.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by Defense Advanced Research Project Administration under contract number HR0011-16-C-0139 (https:// www.darpa.mil). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. This work was supported by DARPA under contract number HR0011-16-C-0139. We are grateful to Peter Devreotes and his lab for many fruitful conversations over the years.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Bhattacharya, Iglesias. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2018/7
Y1 - 2018/7
N2 - Chemotaxis, the migration of cells in the direction of a chemical gradient, is of utmost importance in various biological processes. In recent years, research has demonstrated that the underlying mechanism that controls cell migration is an excitable network. One of the properties that characterizes excitability is the presence of a threshold for activation. Here, we show that excitable systems possess noise filtering capabilities that enable faster and more efficient directed migration compared to other systems that also include a threshold, such as ultrasensitive switches. We demonstrate that this filtering ability is a consequence of the varying responses of excitable systems to step and pulse stimuli. Whereas the response to step inputs is determined solely by the magnitude of the stimulus, for pulse stimuli, the response depends on both the magnitude and duration of the stimulus. We then show that these two forms of threshold behavior can be decoupled from one another, allowing finer control in chemotaxis. Finally, we use a simple model of chemotaxis to demonstrate that cells that rely on an excitable system display faster and more effective directed migration that a hypothetical cell guided by an ultra-sensitive switch.
AB - Chemotaxis, the migration of cells in the direction of a chemical gradient, is of utmost importance in various biological processes. In recent years, research has demonstrated that the underlying mechanism that controls cell migration is an excitable network. One of the properties that characterizes excitability is the presence of a threshold for activation. Here, we show that excitable systems possess noise filtering capabilities that enable faster and more efficient directed migration compared to other systems that also include a threshold, such as ultrasensitive switches. We demonstrate that this filtering ability is a consequence of the varying responses of excitable systems to step and pulse stimuli. Whereas the response to step inputs is determined solely by the magnitude of the stimulus, for pulse stimuli, the response depends on both the magnitude and duration of the stimulus. We then show that these two forms of threshold behavior can be decoupled from one another, allowing finer control in chemotaxis. Finally, we use a simple model of chemotaxis to demonstrate that cells that rely on an excitable system display faster and more effective directed migration that a hypothetical cell guided by an ultra-sensitive switch.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0201283
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0201283
M3 - Article
C2 - 30059517
AN - SCOPUS:85050863797
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 13
JO - PloS one
JF - PloS one
IS - 7
M1 - e0201283
ER -