Bacterial chemotaxis considering memory effects

Abstract

Bacterial chemotaxis for E.coli is controlled by methylation of chemoreceptors, which in a biochemical pathway regulates the concentration of the CheY-P protein that finally controls the tumbling rate. As a consequence, the tumbling rate adjusts to changes in the concentration of relevant chemicals, to produce a biased random walk toward chemoattractants of against the repellers. Methylation is a slow process, implying that the internal concentration of CheY-P is not instantaneously adapted to the environment, and the tumbling rate presents memory. This implies that the Keller-Segel (KS) equations used to describe chemotaxis at the macroscopic scale, which assume a local relation between the bacterial flux and the chemical gradient, are not fully valid as memory and the associated nonlocal response are not considered. To derive the equations that replace the KS ones, we use a kinetic approach, in which a kinetic equation for the bacterial transport is written considering the dynamics of the protein concentration. When memory is large, the protein concentration field must be considered a relevant variable as the bacterial density. Working out the Chapman-Enskog (CE) method, the dynamical equations for these fields are obtained, which have the form of reaction-diffusion equations with flux and source terms depending on the gradients on the chemical signal. The transport coefficients are obtained entirely in terms of the microscopic dynamics, giving their values of the case of E.coli. Solving the equations for an inhomogeneous signal it is shown that the response is nonlocal, with a smoothing length as large as $170μ$m for E.coli. The homogeneous response and the relaxational dynamics are also studied. The case of small memory is also studied, in which case the CE method reproduces the KS equations, with explicit expressions for the transport coefficients.