Related papers: Universality in Bacterial Colonies
Bacteria frequently colonize natural microcavities such as gut crypts, plant apoplasts, and soil pores. Recent studies have shown that the physical structure of these spaces plays a crucial role in shaping the stability and resilience of…
We study the formation of spot patterns seen in a variety of bacterial species when the bacteria are subjected to oxidative stress due to hazardous byproducts of respiration. Our approach consists of coupling the cell density field to a…
Navigation of microorganisms is controlled by internal processes ultimately sensitive to mechanical or chemical signaling encountered along the path. In many natural environments, such as porous soils or physiological ducts, motile species…
Growing living cultures of Escherichia coli bacteria were investigated using real-time in situ rheology and rheo-imaging measurements. In the early stages of growth (lag phase), and when subjected to a constant stationary shear, the…
Topological defects, which are singular points in a director field, play a major role in shaping active systems. Here, we experimentally study topological defects and the flow patterns around them, that are formed during the highly rapid…
The transition from monolayers to multilayered structures in bacterial colonies is a fundamental step in biofilm development. Observed across different morphotypes and species, this transition is triggered within freely growing bacterial…
Sea urchin feeding fronts are a striking example of spatial pattern formation in an ecological system. If it is assumed that urchins are asocial, and that they move randomly, then the formation of these dense fronts is an apparent paradox.…
The rise of multicellularity in the early evolution of life represents a major challenge for evolutionary biology. Guidance for finding answers has emerged from disparate fields, from phylogenetics to modelling and synthetic biology, but…
As a population grows, spreading to new environments may favor specialization. In this paper, we introduce and explore a model for specialization at the front of a colony expanding synchronously into new territory. We show through numerical…
Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…
A wide spectrum of Peritrichous bacteria undergo considerable physiological changes when they are inoculated onto nutrition-rich surfaces and exhibit a rapid and collective migration denoted as swarming. Thereby, the length of such swarmer…
Natural bacterial habitats are often complex fluids with viscoelastic and anisotropic responses to stress; for example, they can take the form of liquid crystals (LCs), with elongated microscopic constituents that collectively align while…
Models of contagion arise broadly both in the biological and social sciences, with applications ranging from the transmission of infectious diseases to the diffusion of innovations and the spread of cultural fads. In this Letter, we…
Complex systems can be described at myriad different scales, and their causal workings often have multiscale structure (e.g., a computer can be described at the microscale of its hardware circuitry, the mesoscale of its machine code, and…
Collective and directed motility or swarming is an emergent phenomenon displayed by many self-organized assemblies of active biological matter such as clusters of embryonic cells during tissue development, cancerous cells during tumor…
We investigate the structure and stability of the steady states for a bacterial colony model with density-suppressed motility. We treat the growth rate of bacteria as a bifurcation parameter to explore the local and global structure of the…
We present a modelling framework for the dynamics of cells structured by the concentration of a micromolecule they contain. We derive general equations for the evolution of the cell population and of the extra-cellular concentration of the…
How motile bacteria move near a surface is a problem of fundamental biophysical interest and is key to the emergence of several phenomena of biological, ecological and medical relevance, including biofilm formation. Solid boundaries can…
Uncovering and understanding universal dynamics in matter far from equilibrium remains a key challenge. In this work, we identify a so far unrecognized form of universal behavior that emerges after a sudden symmetry-breaking quench at…
Universality, encompassing critical exponents, scaling functions, and dimensionless quantities, is fundamental to phase transition theory. In finite systems, universal behaviors are also expected to emerge at the pseudocritical point.…