Chemotaxis paper preprint

Congratulations to Riccardo Foffi and Jonasz Słomka from ETH Zürich for leading this work, “Slower swimming promotes chemotactic encounters between bacteria and small phytoplankton”. A preprint is now available on arXiv here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.03641.

Chemotaxis enables marine bacteria to increase encounters with phytoplankton cells by reducing their search times, provided that bacteria detect noisy chemical gradients around phytoplankton. To date, it has remained unclear how phytoplankton size and bacterial swimming speed affect bacteria’s gradient detection ability and search times for phytoplankton. We found that chemotaxis can substantially decrease search times for small phytoplankton, but this advantage is highly sensitive to variations in bacterial phenotypes or phytoplankton leakage rates. By contrast, chemotaxis towards large phytoplankton cells reduces the search time more modestly, but this benefit is more robust to variations in search or environmental parameters.