2004/05/01 by Y Tsori, Yoav Tsori, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes +1 · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #q-bio.PE
paper · pdf · doi:10.1209/epl/i2003-10237-5
published as Europhys. Lett. 66, 599 (2004) · 4 pages, absolutely no figures
arxiv created 2004/05/05 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
Bacteria (e.g. E. Coli) are very sensitive to certain chemoattractants (e.g. asparate) which they themselves produce. This leads to chemical instabilities in a uniform population. We discuss here the different case of a single bacterium, following the general scheme of Brenner, Levitov and Budrene. We show that in one and two dimensions (in a capillary or in a thin film) the bacterium can become self-trapped in its cloud of attractant. This should occur if a certain coupling constant g is larger than unity. We then estimate the reduced diffusion Deff of the bacterium in the strong coupling limit, and find Deff ~ 1/g.