November 29, 2021
Henry and Keita’s paper quantifying the rate at which E. coli acquire information during navigation was just published in Nature Physics! Using a combination of theory, behavioral experiments, and single-cell FRET, they discovered that bacteria make behavioral decisions with far less information than the one bit needed to determine whether they are headed up or down an attractant gradient. However, they use this limited information very efficiently, suggesting that information acquisition limits chemotactic performance! Check it out for yourself at these links: (html, pdf)