Bulletin of the American Physical Society
2023 APS March Meeting
Volume 68, Number 3
Las Vegas, Nevada (March 5-10)
Virtual (March 20-22); Time Zone: Pacific Time
Session T10: Physics of Learning: Learning and Adaptation in Living Systems
11:30 AM–2:06 PM,
Thursday, March 9, 2023
Room: Room 202
Sponsoring
Unit:
DBIO
Chair: Pradeep Natarajan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract: T10.00010 : Physical Limits on Galvanotaxis*
1:18 PM–1:30 PM
Presenter:
Ifunanya Nwogbaga
(Johns Hopkins University)
Authors:
Ifunanya Nwogbaga
(Johns Hopkins University)
Brian A Camley
(Johns Hopkins University)
A Hyun Kim
(University of Pittsburgh)
taxis”; this ability helps skin cells heal wounds. Recent experimental evidence suggests galvanotaxis
occurs because membrane proteins redistribute via electrophoresis, though the sensing species has
not yet been conclusively identified. We use a physical model to show that stochasticity due to
the finite number of sensing proteins limits the accuracy of galvanotaxis via electrophoresis. Using
maximum likelihood estimation, we show how cells can best interpret this noisy signal, and how
their accuracy should depend on the cell size and electric field strength. Our model can be fit well
to data measuring galvanotaxis of keratocytes, neural crest cells, and granulocytes. Our results
show that eukaryotic cells can likely achieve experimentally observed directionalities with either a
relatively small number (around 100) of highly-polarized proteins, or a large number (∼ 10000) of
proteins with a relatively small change in concentration across the cell (∼ 7% change from cathode
to anode). This may explain why identifying the sensor species has been difficult, as candidates
need not be strongly polarized even in large electric fields. A second prediction of the model is that
the accuracy of cells in predicting the electric field direction only weakly depends on their size.
*Supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. MCB 2119948 and PHY 1915491.
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