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Title: Chemotactic movement of a polarity site enables yeast cells to find their mates.

Authors: Ghose, Debraj; Jacobs, Katherine; Ramirez, Samuel; Elston, Timothy; Lew, Daniel

Published In Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, (2021 06 01)

Abstract: How small eukaryotic cells can interpret dynamic, noisy, and spatially complex chemical gradients to orient growth or movement is poorly understood. We address this question using Saccharomyces cerevisiae, where cells orient polarity up pheromone gradients during mating. Initial orientation is often incorrect, but polarity sites then move around the cortex in a search for partners. We find that this movement is biased by local pheromone gradients across the polarity site: that is, movement of the polarity site is chemotactic. A bottom-up computational model recapitulates this biased movement. The model reveals how even though pheromone-bound receptors do not mimic the shape of external pheromone gradients, nonlinear and stochastic effects combine to generate effective gradient tracking. This mechanism for gradient tracking may be applicable to any cell that searches for a target in a complex chemical landscape.

PubMed ID: 34050026 Exiting the NIEHS site

MeSH Terms: Cell Polarity*; Chemotaxis*; Computational Biology/methods; Saccharomyces cerevisiae Proteins/metabolism; Saccharomyces cerevisiae/cytology*; Saccharomyces cerevisiae/metabolism; Saccharomyces cerevisiae/physiology

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