Related papers: Formation and Dissolution of Bacterial Colonies
Hydrodynamic flows in biological systems are often generated by active chiral processes near or on surfaces. Important examples are beating cilia, force generation in actomyosin networks, and motile bacteria interacting with surfaces. Here…
In this article, we study in details the fluid dynamics system proposed in Clarelli et al (2013) to model the formation of cyanobacteria biofilms. After analyzing the linear stability of the unique non trivial equilibrium of the system, we…
Under special conditions bacteria excrete an attractant and aggregate. The high density regions initially collapse into cylindrical structures, which subsequently destabilize and break up into spherical aggregates. This paper presents a…
The sustenance of life depends on the high degree of organization that prevails through different levels of living organisms, from subcellular structures such as biomolecular complexes and organelles to tissues and organs. The physical…
The striking variety of macroscopic morphologies displayed by bacterial colonies depends on microscopic environmental and behavioural details in a manner that is currently not well understood. A surprising example is sibling inhibition,…
Bacteria populate the colon where they replicate and migrate in response to nutrient availability. Here I model the colon bacterial population as a sandpile model, the colon-pile. Sand addition mimics bacterial replication and grains…
In biology, the evolution of increasingly cooperative groups has shaped the history of life. Genes collaborate in the control of cells; cells efficiently divide tasks to produce cohesive multicellular individuals; individual members of…
Microbes require several complex organic molecules for growth. A species may obtain a required factor by taking up molecules released by other species or by synthesizing the molecule. The patterns of uptake and synthesis set a flow of…
We investigate the hydrodynamic stability and the formation of patterns in a continuum model of epithelial layers, able to account for the interplay between mechanical activity, lateral adhesion and the $6-$fold orientational order…
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…
We experimentally investigate how aerotactic bacteria, confined within a thin liquid film between two solid substrates, respond to a controlled oxygen gradient. We find that the total bacterial number density dictates which mechanism…
Toxic cyanobacterial blooms are a growing environmental concern that affects freshwater ecosystems, drinking water supplies, and public health. The cyanobacterium Microcystis is among the most important bloom forming species. It often grows…
We propose a simple experiment to study delocalization and extinction in inhomogeneous biological systems. The nonlinear steady state for, say, a bacteria colony living on and near a patch of nutrient or favorable illumination (``oasis'')…
Drying of bacterial suspensions is frequently encountered in a plethora of natural and engineering processes. However, the evaporation-driven mechanical instabilities of dense consolidating bacterial suspensions have not been explored…
A theoretical study of the structure formation observed very recently [Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 128303 (2003)] in binary colloids is presented. In our model solely the dipole-dipole interaction of the particles is considered,…
Bacterial cells exhibit a diverse array of shapes and sizes, largely governed by their cell walls in conjunction with cytoskeletal proteins and internal turgor pressure. The present study develops a theoretical framework for modeling the…
Models of planet formation are built on underlying physical processes. In order to make sense of the origin of the planets we must first understand the origin of their building blocks. This review comes in two parts. The first part presents…
A hallmark of bacterial populations cultured in vitro is their homogeneity of growth, where the majority of cells display identical growth rate, cell size and content. Recent insights, however, have revealed that even cells growing in…
Models of planet formation are mainly focused on the accretion and dynamical processes of the planets, neglecting their chemical composition. In this work, we calculate the condensation sequence of the different chemical elements for a…
To model the morphogenesis of rod-shaped bacterial micro-colony, several individual-based models have been proposed in the biophysical literature. When studying the shape of micro-colonies, most models present interaction forces such as…