Speaker Name: Dr. Niladri Sekhar Mandal (Pennsylvania State University)

Date: 14-01-2026 (Wednesday)

Time: 2:30 PM

Venue: LC 102

Abstract: Chemotaxis is the directional motion of an entity in response to the gradient of a chemical. Although historically observed in bacteria, enzymes also show this phenomenon in response to the gradient of their substrate or product. Enzyme chemotaxis has many modern-day applications ranging from accelerated drug discovery to targeted drug delivery. In this work, we derive a minimum model for enzyme chemotaxis by employing mass-transport
equations. We show that two factors 1) diffusion asymmetry and 2) kinetic asymmetry control the direction of enzyme chemotaxis.
Further, we show that enzyme chemotaxis can drive nonreciprocal interactions in pairs of complementary enzymes, where the substrate of one is the product of the other. Nonreciprocal interactions are an apparent violation of Newton's third law of motion and are part and parcel of living systems. Nonreciprocity is at the heart of predator prey interactions, swarming of insects, and flocking of birds among other collective behaviors. Our work now extends this phenomenon to the nanoscale. We believe that this molecular mechanism of nonreciprocal interactions will throw light on life-like prebiotic systems as well as on the theory of the origin of life.