Distributed Gradient Descent in Bacterial Food Search

Singh, Shashank, Rashid, Sabrina, Long, Zhicheng, Navlakha, Saket, Salman, Hanna, Oltvai, Zoltan, Bar-Joseph, Ziv (April 2016) Distributed Gradient Descent in Bacterial Food Search. Research in Computational Molecular Biology, 9649. ISSN 978-3-319-31957-5

Abstract

Communication and coordination play a major role in the ability of bacterial cells to adapt to ever changing environments and conditions. Recent work has shown that such coordination underlies several aspects of bacterial responses including their ability to develop antibiotic resistance. Here we develop a new distributed gradient descent method that helps explain how bacterial cells collectively search for food in harsh environments using extremely limited communication and computational complexity. This method can also be used for computational tasks when agents are facing similarly restricted conditions. We formalize the communication and computation assumptions required for successful coordination and prove that the method we propose leads to convergence even when using a dynamically changing interaction network. The proposed method improves upon prior models suggested for bacterial foraging despite making fewer assumptions. Simulation studies and analysis of experimental data illustrate the ability of the method to explain and further predict several aspects of bacterial swarm food search.

Item Type: Paper
Subjects: bioinformatics > computational biology > algorithms
organism description > bacteria
CSHL Authors:
Communities: CSHL labs > Navlakha lab
Depositing User: Matthew Dunn
Date: 11 April 2016
Date Deposited: 08 Nov 2019 14:59
Last Modified: 08 Nov 2019 14:59
URI: https://repository.cshl.edu/id/eprint/38676

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