Zebrafish airinemes optimize their shape between ballistic and diffusive search
- University of California, Irvine, United States
- University of Pennsylvania, United States
Abstract
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 shapes 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.
Data availability
Data and computational scripts are available in a repository mentioned in the manuscript (on GitHub)https://github.com/sohyeonparkgithub/Airineme-optimal-target-search
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Science Foundation (DMS-1454739)
- Jun Allard
National Institutes of Health (R35GM142791)
- Yi Wang
- Dae Seok Eom
National Science Foundation (DMS 1763272)
- Sohyeon Park
- Jun Allard
Simons Foundation (594598,QN)
- Sohyeon Park
Simons Foundation (Math+X U Penn)
- Hyunjoong Kim
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All animal work in this study was conducted with the approval of the University of California Irvine Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (Protocol #AUP-19-043) in accordance with institutional and federal guidelines for the ethical use of animals.
Copyright
© 2022, Park et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Zebrafish airinemes optimize their shape between ballistic and diffusive search
eLife 11:e75690.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.75690
