The stochastic dance of circling sperm cells: sperm chemotaxis in the plane
By B. Friedrich, Frank Jülicher. 2008
88 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Biological systems such as single cells must function in the presence of fluctuations. It has been shown in a two-dimensional experimental setup that sea urchin sperm cells move toward a source of chemoattractant along planar trochoidal swimming paths, i.e. drifting circles. In these experiments, a pronounced variability of the swimming paths is observed. We present a theoretical description of sperm chemotaxis in two dimensions which takes fluctuations into account. We derive a coarse-grained theory of stochastic sperm swimming paths in a concentration field of chemoattractant. Fluctuations enter as multiplicative noise in the equations for the sperm swimming path. We discuss the stochastic properties of sperm swimming and predict a concentration-dependence of the effective diffusion constant of sperm swimming which could be tested in experiments.
Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Molecular Biology, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/51cd3c7bf18b0b4dcdac1d229bba3f83ec644cdf
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Condensed Matter Physics
- Charles Reichhardt
- Lutz Schimansky-Geier
- S. Teeffelen
- Hartmut Löwen
- R. Di Leonardo
- Hartmut Lowen
- Giorgio Volpe
- P. Romanczuk
In Molecular Biology
In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
- Lutz Schimansky-Geier
- Hartmut Löwen
- Charles Reichhardt
- P. Romanczuk
- Werner Ebeling
- M. Bär
- Benjamin Lindner
- Giovanni Volpe
Citations in the corpus
- Brownian motion of a self-propelled particle. (2010, background): “Next, a non-Gaussian noise [67] in the Langevin equations might be relevant for modelling real swimming objects [13, 66].”
- Active Particles in Complex and Crowded Environments (2016, background): “…observed in many different situations, in particular close to a substrate for bacteria (Berg and Turner, 1990; DiLuzio et al., 2005; Hill et al., 2007; Lauga et al., 2006; Schmidt et al., 2008; Shenoy et al., 2007) and spermatozoa (Friedrich and Jülicher, 2008; Riedel et al., 2005; Woolley, 2003).”
- Active Brownian particles (2012, methodology): “In the following, we consider again particles moving with constant speed s = v0 and under the influence of a time-dependent torque [351,123,124].”