Abstract
Molecular communication is key for multicellular organisms. In plants, the exchange of nutrients and signals between cells is facilitated by tunnels called plasmodesmata. Such transport processes in complex geometries can be simulated using particle-based approaches, these, however, are computationally expensive. Here, we evaluate the narrow escape problem as a framework for describing intercellular transport. We introduce a volumetric adjustment factor for estimating escape times from non-spherical geometries. We validate this approximation against full 3D stochastic simulations and provide results for a range of cell sizes and diffusivities. We discuss how this approach can be extended using recent results on multiple trap problems to account for different plasmodesmata distributions with varying apertures.
Highlights
D EFINING features of higher organisms include multicellularity, cell differentiation and tissue specificity, all of which rely on communication and coordination between cells [1]
The distribution and geometry of plasmodesmata can be described by the cell wall permeability, which can result in a significant change to the movement of the molecule
Using Eq (2), we evaluated a realistic range of plasmodesmata densities and apertures [13] and find that the mean narrow escape time is within the range of 0.73 to 1.36 s for a cell of length 40 μm under non-stressed conditions (Fig. 3)
Summary
The exchange of nutrients and signals between cells is facilitated by tunnels called plasmodesmata. Such transport processes in complex geometries can be simulated using particle-based approaches, these, are computationally expensive. We introduce a volumetric adjustment factor for estimating escape times from non-spherical geometries We validate this approximation against full 3D stochastic simulations and provide results for a range of cell sizes and diffusivities. We discuss how this approach can be extended using recent results on multiple trap problems to account for different plasmodesmata distributions with varying apertures
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