Paper in PNAS

Congratulations to the team – in particular Riccardo Foffi and Jonasz Słomka from ETH Zürich – for this latest publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Chemotaxis can aid bacteria in navigating the gradients of chemicals exuded by phytoplankton cells, yet these gradients can often be noisy, and the type of noise experienced by chemotactic bacteria depends on the size of the phytoplankton cell. Combining the size dependence of the limits of chemotactic detection and cell–cell encounters, we show that bacteria searching for phytoplankton can benefit the most from chemotaxis toward small rather than large cells.