Effects of thermal fluctuation and the receptor-receptor interaction in bacterial chemotactic signalling and adaptation

Bacterial chemotaxis is controlled by the conformational changes of the receptors, in response to the change of the ambient chemical concentration. In a statistical mechanical approach, the signalling due to the conformational changes is a thermodynamic average quantity, dependent on the temperature and the total energy of the system, including both ligand-receptor interaction and receptor-receptor interaction. This physical theory suggests to biology a new understanding of cooperation in ligand binding and receptor signalling problems. How much experimental support of this approach can be obtained from the currently available data? What are the parameter values? What is the practical information for experiments? Here we make comparisons between the theory and recent experimental results. Although currently comparisons can only be semi-quantitative or qualitative, consistency is clearly shown. The theory also helps to sort a variety of data.Comment: 26 pages, revtex. Journal version. Analysis on another set of data on adaptation time is adde