The Bacterial Brain: All-Atom Description of Receptor Clustering and Cooperativity Within a Bacterial Chemoreceptor Array

Yann Chemla, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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The ability of organisms to sense and respond to signals from an often complex and restless environment is central to survival. Bacterial chemotaxis has long served as the standard model for biochemical and behavioral aspects of such sensory phenomenon in motile bacteria and higher organisms. Now, with the advent of the Blue Waters supercomputer and petascale computing, for the first time we can investigate the molecular details that underlie the systems-level properties of this signaling protein network. Through a combination of single-cell biophysical techniques and advanced computational and molecular modeling tools, we seek to connect the whole-cell and molecular scales to better understand the emergence of enhanced signaling properties in this important biological information processing system.