The stochastic dance of circling sperm cells: sperm chemotaxis in the plane

Details The stochastic dance of circling sperm cells: sperm chemotaxis in the plane The stochastic dance of circling sperm cells: sperm chemotaxis in the plane

Dec 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008njph...10l3025f&link_type=abstract

New Journal of Physics, Volume 10, Issue 12, pp. 123025 (2008).

Physics

12

Scientific paper

Biological systems such as single cells must function in the presence of fluctuations. It has been shown in a two-dimensional experimental setup that sea urchin sperm cells move toward a source of chemoattractant along planar trochoidal swimming paths, i.e. drifting circles. In these experiments, a pronounced variability of the swimming paths is observed. We present a theoretical description of sperm chemotaxis in two dimensions which takes fluctuations into account. We derive a coarse-grained theory of stochastic sperm swimming paths in a concentration field of chemoattractant. Fluctuations enter as multiplicative noise in the equations for the sperm swimming path. We discuss the stochastic properties of sperm swimming and predict a concentration-dependence of the effective diffusion constant of sperm swimming which could be tested in experiments.

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