FRET measurements and multiscale modeling of E.coli chemotaxis

By the late 1990-s E.coli chemotaxis was a well-established field, and the chemotaxis pathway was reasonably well described to a point where mathematical modeling became a powerful tool (e.g. Barkai & Leibler, 1997)

The introduction of FRET for measurement of protein interactions exploded the chemotaxis field (Sourjik & Berg, 2002). It allowed measuring protein interactions between pathway components in live cells in real time, compared to costly time-averaged in vitro biochemical assays. The avalanche of new data revealed, for example, that receptors are organized in clusters that amplify the signal, and inspired a new generation of mathematical models describing the system with unprecedented accuracy (Tu, Shimizu, Berg, 2008).

I was happy to contibute my 5 cents to the field of modeling of E.coli chemotaxis: RapidCell simulator which allows fast and accurate multiscale modeling of bacterial populations in attractant gradients. It allowed us to predict an additional aspect of chemotactic navigation - the gradient-dependent tumbling angle (Vladimirov, Lebiedz, Sourjik, 2010), which was later confirmed in experiments (Saragosi et al, 2011).