Many organisms form colonies for a transient period of time to withstand environmental pressure. Bacterial biofilms are a prototypical example of such behavior. Despite significant interest across disciplines, physical mechanisms governing the formation and dissolution of bacterial colonies are still poorly understood. Starting from a kinetic description of motile and interacting cells we derive a hydrodynamic equation for their density on a surface. We use it to describe formation of multiple colonies with sizes consistent with experimental data and to discuss their dissolution.
@article{arxiv.1506.01200,
title = {Formation and Dissolution of Bacterial Colonies},
author = {Christoph Weber and Yen Ting Lin and Nicolas Biais and Vasily Zaburdaev},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.01200},
year = {2015}
}