Slide 17 of 32
Notes:
However, if we blow up the vertical axis, you can see that to reach that concentration at the cell surface, there must be far higher concentrations inside the cell.
For quorum sensing, where the signal is autocatalytic, leading to further producion of signal and phenotypic behaviors, this result is very important.
Furthermore, at risk of stating the obvious, if a cell is producing signal, there cannot be diffusion to the cell. Some of the very few papers on this topic include a term for diffusion to the cell based on differences in concentration.
