RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Zebrafish airinemes optimize their shape between ballistic and diffusive search
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.10.24.465630
DO 10.1101/2021.10.24.465630
A1 Sohyeon Park
A1 Hyunjoong Kim
A1 Yi Wang
A1 Dae Seok Eom
A1 Jun Allard
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/11/18/2021.10.24.465630.abstract
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.