PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Sohyeon Park
AU  - Hyunjoong Kim
AU  - Yi Wang
AU  - Dae Seok Eom
AU  - Jun Allard
TI  - Zebrafish airinemes optimize their shape between ballistic and diffusive search
AID  - 10.1101/2021.10.24.465630
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.10.24.465630
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/10/26/2021.10.24.465630.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/10/26/2021.10.24.465630.full
AB  - In addition to diffusive signals, cells in tissue also communicate via long, thin cellular protrusions, such as airinemes in zebrafish. Before establishing communication, cellular protrusions must find their target cell. Here we demonstrate that the shape of airinemes in zebrafish are consistent with a finite persistent random walk model. The probability of contacting the target cell is maximized for a balance between ballistic search (straight) and diffusive search (highly curved, random). We find that the curvature of airinemes in zebrafish, extracted from live cell microscopy, is approximately the same value as the optimum in the simple persistent random walk model. We also explore the ability of the target cell to infer direction of the airineme’s source, finding that there is a theoretical trade-off between search optimality and directional information. This provides a framework to characterize the shape, and performance objectives, of non-canonical cellular protrusions in general.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.