Stochastic dynamics of chemotactic colonies with logistic growth

Published in EPL, 2022

Abstract:

The interplay between cellular growth and cell-cell signaling is essential for the aggregation and proliferation of bacterial colonies, as well as for the self-organization of cell tissues. To investigate this interplay, we focus here on the collective properties of dividing chemotactic cell colonies by studying their long-time and large-scale dynamics through a renormalization group (RG) approach. The RG analysis reveals that a relevant but unconventional chemotactic interaction -- corresponding to a polarity-induced mechanism -- is generated by fluctuations at macroscopic scales, even when an underlying mechanism is absent at the microscopic level. This emerges from the interplay of the well-known Keller--Segel (KS) chemotactic nonlinearity and cell birth and death processes. At one-loop order, we find no stable fixed point of the RG flow equations. We discuss a connection between the dynamics investigated here and the celebrated Kardar--Parisi--Zhang (KPZ) equation with long-range correlated noise, which points at the existence of a strong-coupling, nonperturbative fixed point.

Recommended citation: "Stochastic dynamics of chemotactic colonies with logistic growth", R. Ben Alì Zinati, C. Duclut, S. Mahdisoltani, A. Gambassi, and R. Golestanian, EPL 136, 50003 (2022). https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1209/0295-5075/ac48c9