What's the big/guiding question? From a 30,000 ft view, what makes a system adaptive? In particular, for the two models we will explore in some detail here (bacterial chemotaxis and developmental patterning) what mathematical feature (and underlying biological feature) imparts adaptivity to the mathematical system of equations?
While it is absolutely not representative to condense the scientific endeavor into understanding adaptation in bacterial chemotaxis into 3 papers, the 3 found below are amongst some of the more important papers.
- Block SM, Segall JE, Berg HC. Impulse responses in bacterial chemotaxis. Cell. 1982 Nov;31(1):215–26.
- Leibler S, Alon U, Surette MG, Barkai N. Robustness in bacterial chemotaxis. Nature. 1999 Jan 14;397(6715):168–71.
- Leibler S, Barkai N. Robustness in simple biochemical networks. Nature. 1997 Jun 26;387(6636):913–7.