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Biophysical Journal 87:1578-1595 (2004)
© 2004 The Biophysical Society

Effects of Receptor Interaction in Bacterial Chemotaxis

Bernardo A. Mello *, Leah Shaw {dagger} and Yuhai Tu {ddagger}

* Physics Department, Catholic University of Brasilia, 72030-170, Brasilia, DF, Brazil; {dagger} Department of Physics and School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853 USA; and {ddagger} IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 USA

Correspondence: Address reprint requests to Yuhai Tu, Tel.: 914-945-2762; Fax: 914-945-4506, E-mail: yuhai{at}us.ibm.com.

Signaling in bacterial chemotaxis is mediated by several types of transmembrane chemoreceptors. The chemoreceptors form tight polar clusters whose functions are of great biological interest. Here, we study the general properties of a chemotaxis model that includes interaction between neighboring chemoreceptors within a receptor cluster and the appropriate receptor methylation and demethylation dynamics to maintain (near) perfect adaptation. We find that, depending on the receptor coupling strength, there are two steady-state phases in the model: a stationary phase and an oscillatory phase. The mechanism for the existence of the two phases is understood analytically. Two important phenomena in transient response, the overshoot in response to a pulse stimulus and the high gain in response to sustained changes in external ligand concentrations, can be explained in our model, and the mechanisms for these two seemingly different phenomena are found to be closely related. The model also naturally accounts for several key in vitro response experiments and the recent in vivo fluorescence resonance energy transfer experiments for various mutant strains. Quantitatively, our study reveals possible choices of parameters for fitting the existing experiments and suggests future experiments to test the model predictions.




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