Theory of One-Stage Chemoreception

Once the ligand current into a single receptor is known, the next task is to develop a general theory for the rate of absorption of ligands by a cell of any shape that carries a large number of identical receptors in its cell membrane (cf. section 1.4 (d)). In this chapter we address this problem, using the effective boundary condition method of DeLisi and Wiegel [1] and Wiegel [2], which can in principle be applied to cells of any shape, with an arbitrary distribution of receptors in the cell membrane. We shall include cases in which there are forces acting between the ligands and the cell and a flow field is present too.