https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/s10189-025-00525-z
Regular Article - Living Systems
Dynamics of chemoreceptor activity with time-periodic attractant field
Department of Physics of Complex Systems, S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Block JD, Sector 3, 700106, Salt Lake, Kolkata, India
a
sakuntala.chatterjee@bose.res.in
Received:
24
June
2025
Accepted:
1
October
2025
Published online:
19
October
2025
When exposed to a time-periodic chemical signal, an E.coli cell responds by modulating its receptor activity in a similar time-periodic manner. But there is a phase lag between the applied signal and activity response. We study the variation of activity amplitude and phase lag as a function of applied frequency 
, using numerical simulations. The amplitude increases with , reaches a plateau and then decreases again for large . The phase lag increases monotonically with and finally saturates to 
when is large. The activity is no more a single-valued function of the attractant signal, and plotting activity vs attractant concentration over one complete time period generates a loop. We monitor the loop area as a function of and find two peaks for small and large and a sharp minimum at intermediate values. We explain these results from an interplay between the timescales associated with adaptation, activity switching and applied signal variation. In particular, for very large the quasi-equilibrium approximation for activity dynamics breaks down, which has not been explored in earlier studies. We perform analytical calculation in this limit and find good agreement with our simulation results.
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Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
