Chemoreception by a Swimming Cell

Abstract

In many cases of biological interest the cell which is involved in chemoreception is in a state of uniform motion with respect to the surrounding extracellular fluid. This situation would describe a swimming bacterium, for example. If the cell is described by the standard spherical model with N binding sites, as discussed in section IV.2, one can ask for the effect of swimming on the rate of ligand capture. Up till now this question has not been studied theoretically in a fully satisfactory way. It is the aim of this short chapter to formulate the problem as far as possible, to identify the dimensionless parameters which occur in it, and to solve it in some limiting cases.