Eukaryotic chemotaxis - how amoebae use non-equilibrium physics to figure out where to go

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• Professor Herbert Levine, Department of Physics, University of California San Diego, California
• Thursday 28 January 2010, 11:00-12:00
• Seminar Room, Centre for Physics of Medicine (PoM).

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Duncan Simpson.

Many types of eukaryotic cells are able to detect chemical gradients and move accordingly. Unlike the case for bacteria, these cells are large enough for the gradient detection to rely on differential receptor binding probabilities on the cell membrane. It is not yet understood how this noisy input data is processed by the cell to make the motion decision; thus we cannot a priori predict the detection threshold, the response kinetics and the plasticity to changing stimuli. This talk will focus on some recent nonlinear models of this cellular information processing system and on experiments in progress on the amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum to test some of the resulting expectations.

This talk is part of the Physics of Medicine (PoM) Seminar Series series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• CamBridgeSens
• Life Science Interface Seminars
• Life Sciences
• Life Sciences
• Physics of Living Matter - PLM
• Physics of Medicine (PoM) Seminar Series
• School of Physical Sciences
• Seminar Room, Centre for Physics of Medicine (PoM)
• slj38

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