Bacterial strategies for chemotaxis response.

ABSTRACT: Regular environmental conditions allow for the evolution of specifically adapted responses, whereas complex environments usually lead to conflicting requirements upon the organism's response. A relevant instance of these issues is bacterial chemotaxis, where the evolutionary and functional reasons for the experimentally observed response to chemoattractants remain a riddle. Sensing and motility requirements are in fact optimized by different responses, which strongly depend on the chemoattractant environmental profiles. It is not clear then how those conflicting requirements quantitatively combine and compromise in shaping the chemotaxis response. Here we show that the experimental bacterial response corresponds to the maximin strategy that ensures the highest minimum uptake of chemoattrac

SUBMITTER: Celani A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2824349 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature