Patch coalescence as a mechanism for eukaryotic directional sensing

Abstract

Eukaryotic cells possess a sensible chemical compass allowing them to orient toward sources of soluble chemicals. The extracellular chemical signal triggers separation of the cell membrane into two domains populated by different phospholipid molecules and oriented along the signal anisotropy. We propose a theory of this polarization process, which is articulated into subsequent stages of germ nucleation, patch coarsening and merging into a single domain. We find that the polarization time, $t_{\epsilon }$, depends on the anisotropy degree $\epsilon$ through the power law $t_{\epsilon }\propto {\epsilon }^{-2}$, and that in a cell of radius $R$ there should exist a threshold value ${\epsilon }_{\mathrm{th}}\propto R^{-1}$ for the smallest detectable anisotropy.

References in corpus (2)

• Theory of Phase Ordering Kinetics
• Epigenetics as a first exit problem

Cited by in corpus (11)

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• Spatial signal amplification in cell biology: a lattice-gas model for self-tuned phase ordering
• Nucleation dynamics in 2d cylindrical Ising models and chemotaxis
• Sorting of multiple molecular species on cell membranes
• Enzyme-driven phase separation
• Self tuning phase separation in a model with competing interactions inspired by biological cell polarization