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Lookup NU author(s): Jason Bains, Professor Andrew Baggaley, Dr Otti CrozeORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2025 The Authors. Chemotaxis allows swimming bacteria to navigate through chemical landscapes. To date, continuum models of chemotactic populations (e.g. Patlak-Keller-Segel models) have considered bacteria responding only to spatial chemical gradients. In these models, chemotactic advection is modelled through a drift velocity proportional to the spatial chemical gradient. In nature and industry, however, bacterial populations experience dynamic, spatio-temporally varying chemical environments, such as the neighbourhood of lysing phytoplankton cells. Recent analyses have shown how temporal gradients can 'confuse' individual bacteria, impacting the precision of their gradient estimation. However, very few studies have considered how temporal gradients influence the chemotactic drift velocity of whole populations. Here, we use Monte Carlo simulations to infer the drift velocity of a population when both spatial and temporal gradients are present. We propose an ansatz for the drift velocity, which fits the simulations well. This ansatz allows us to account for how temporal gradients can significantly impact chemotaxis of bacterial populations up a spatial gradient. We explore the consequences of this new effect through a Patlak-Keller-Segel type model applied to single decaying and oscillating pulses of chemoattractant. Finally, we discuss possible biological consequences of our results and extensions of our modelling framework. This article is part of the theme issue 'Biological fluid dynamics: emerging directions'.
Author(s): Bains JS, Baggaley AW, Croze OA
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
Year: 2025
Volume: 383
Issue: 2304
Online publication date: 11/09/2025
Acceptance date: 08/05/2025
Date deposited: 30/09/2025
ISSN (print): 1364-503X
ISSN (electronic): 1471-2962
Publisher: Royal Society Publishing
URL: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2024.0261
DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2024.0261
Data Access Statement: This manuscript has associated data in a data repository. Code and data associated with this manuscript are available from the Zenodo repository: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14237204 Supplementary material is available online: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.7942818.v1
PubMed id: 40931662
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