UNLABELLED Elevated intracellular levels of the bacterial second messenger c-di-GMP are known to suppress motility and promote sessility. Bacterial chemotaxis guides motile cells in gradients of attractants and repellents over broad concentration ranges, thus allowing bacteria to quickly adapt to changes in their surroundings. Here, we describe a chemotaxis receptor that enhances, as opposed to...

BACKGROUND In the early stages of development of the cellular slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum, chemotaxis toward cAMP plays a pivotal role in organizing discrete cells into a multicellular structure. In this process, a series of signaling molecules, such as G-protein-coupled cell surface receptors for cAMP, phosphatidylinositol metabolites, and cyclic nucleotides, function as the signal tra...

Chemotaxis of bacteria requires regulated methylation of chemoreceptors. However, despite considerable effort in the 1980s, transmethylation has never been established as a component of eukaryotic cell chemotaxis. S-adenosylhomocysteine (SAH), the product formed when the methyl group of the universal donor S-adenosylmethionine (SAM) is transferred to an acceptor molecule, is a potent inhibitor ...

Chemokines critically regulate chemotaxis in normal and pathologic states, but there is limited understanding of how multicellular interactions generate gradients needed for cell migration. Previous studies of chemotaxis of CXCR4+ cells toward chemokine CXCL12 suggest the requirement of cells expressing scavenger receptor CXCR7 in a source-sink system. We leveraged an established microfluidic d...

Chemotaxis is defined as a behavior involving organisms sensing attractants or repellents and leading towards or away from them. Therefore, it is possible to reengineer chemotaxis network to control the movement of bacteria to our advantage. Understanding the design principles of chemotaxis pathway is a prerequisite and an important topic in synthetic biology. Here, we provide guidelines for ch...

Mononuclear phagocytes (Mphi) produce urokinase-type plasminogen activator (uPA) and also express a specific cell-surface receptor for urokinase, uPAR. The concomitant expression of these proteins provides a mechanism by which Mphi can degrade extracellular matrix proteins during directed cell migration. In this study, we sought to determine if uPAR plays a role in Mphi chemotaxis that is disti...

In this paper we develop a numerical scheme for approximating d -dimensional chemotaxis-Navier–Stokes system, =2, 3, modeling cellular swimming in incompressible fluids. This model describes the chemotaxis-fluid interaction cases where chemical signal is consumed with rate proportional to amount of organisms. We construct approximations based on Finite Element method and analyze optimal error e...

Chemokine receptors CCR3 and CCR4 are preferentially expressed by TH2 cells, mast cells, and/or eosinophils, all of which are involved in the pathogenesis of allergic diseases. Therefore, CCR3 and CCR4 have long been highlighted as potent therapeutic targets for allergic diseases. Japanese traditional herbal medicine Kampo consists of multiple crude drugs/herbs, which further consist of numerou...

We present a static microfluidic device without use of hydrogel barrier for the generation of chemical gradient. The microfluidic device allows for the analysis of bacterial chemotaxis without use of hydrogel, membrane, and pump. We demonstrate a chemotactic response to attractant and repellent by measuring of dynamic change of bacterial population in detection area. In this chemotaxis assay, b...

Chemotaxis allows bacteria to colonize their environment more efficiently and to find optimal growth conditions, and is consequently under strong evolutionary selection. Theoretical and experimental analyses of bacterial chemotaxis suggested that the pathway has been evolutionarily optimized to produce robust output under conditions of such physiological perturbations as stochastic intercellula...