Perspective on interdisciplinary approaches on chemotaxis

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Simmchen, Juliane and Gordon, Daniel and MacKenzie, John and Pagonabarraga, Ignacio and Roggatz, Christina C. and Endres, Robert G. and Xiao, Zuyao and Friedrich, Benjamin M. and Qiu, Tian and Painter, Kevin J. and Golestanian, Ramin and Contini, Claudia and Ucar, Mehmet Can and Yossifon, Gilad and Sommer, Jens Uwe and Rappel, Wouter-Jan and Wan, Kirsty Y. and Armitage, Judith and Insall, Robert (2025) Perspective on interdisciplinary approaches on chemotaxis. Angewandte Chemie International Edition. ISSN 1521-3773 (https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.202504790)

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Abstract

Most living things on Earth – from bacteria to humans – must migrate in some way to find favourable conditions. Therefore, they nearly all use chemotaxis, in which their movement is steered by a gradient of chemicals. Chemotaxis is fundamental to many processes that control our well-being, including inflammation, neuronal patterning, wound healing, tumour spread in cancer, even embryogenesis. Understanding it is a key goal for biologists. Despite the fact that many basic principles appear to have been conserved throughout evolution, most research has focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms that control signal processing and locomotion. Cell signaling – cells responding to time-varying external signals – underlies almost all biological processes at the cellular scale. Chemotaxis of single cells provides particularly amenable model systems for quantitative cell signaling studies, even in the presence of noise and fluctuations, because the output, the cell's motility response, is directly observable. However, the different scientific disciplines involved in chemotaxis research rarely overlap, so biologists, physicists and mathematicians interact far too infrequently, methodologies and models differ and commonalities are often overlooked, such as the possible influence of physical or environmental conditions, which has been largely neglected.

ORCID iDs

Simmchen, Juliane ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9073-9770, Gordon, Daniel, MacKenzie, John ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4412-7057, Pagonabarraga, Ignacio, Roggatz, Christina C., Endres, Robert G., Xiao, Zuyao, Friedrich, Benjamin M., Qiu, Tian, Painter, Kevin J., Golestanian, Ramin, Contini, Claudia, Ucar, Mehmet Can, Yossifon, Gilad, Sommer, Jens Uwe, Rappel, Wouter-Jan, Wan, Kirsty Y., Armitage, Judith and Insall, Robert;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)