Zebrafish airinemes optimize their shape between ballistic and diffusive search

Abstract
Data availability
Article and author information
Metrics

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

The following data sets were generated

1. Park S
2. Kim H
3. Li Y
4. Eom DS
5. Allard J
(2021) Airineme experimental data and codes
GitHub.

https://github.com/sohyeonparkgithub/Airineme-optimal-target-search

Article and author information

Author details

Sohyeon Park

Center for Complex Biological Systems, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Hyunjoong Kim

Department of Mathematics, University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-3534-2102
Yi Wang

Center for Complex Biological Systems, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-7409-4335
Dae Seok Eom

Center for Complex Biological Systems, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, United States

For correspondence
dseom@uci.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Jun Allard

dDepartment of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, United States

For correspondence
jun.allard@uci.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-2758-4515

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

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.