Related papers: Emergent pattern formation in an interstitial biof…
Microorganisms are ubiquitous in nature and technology. They inhabit diverse environments ranging from small river tributaries and lakes to oceans, as well as wastewater treatment plants and food manufacturing. In many of these…
Spatiotemporal patterns are common in biological systems. For electrically-coupled cells previous studies of pattern formation have mainly used external forcing as the main bifurcation parameter. The purpose of this paper is to show that…
We experimentally study the emergence of collective bacterial swimming, a phenomenon often referred to as bacterial turbulence. A phase diagram of the flow of 3D E. coli suspensions spanned by bacterial concentration, the swimming speed of…
The paper develops the stiffness relationship between the movements and forces among a system of discrete interacting grains. The approach is similar to that used in structural analysis, but the stiffness matrix of granular material is…
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…
We study the surface wrinkling of a stiff thin elastic film bonded to a compliant graded elastic substrate subject to compressive stress generated either by compression or growth of the bilayer. Our aim is to clarify the influence of the…
Motile cells often explore natural environments characterized by a high degree of structural complexity. Moreover cell motility is also intrinsically noisy due to spontaneous random reorientation and speed fluctuations. This interplay of…
Recently, we proposed a self-propelled particle model with competing alignment interactions: nearby particles tend to align their velocities whereas they anti-align their direction of motion with particles which are further away [R.…
It is known from both experiments and molecular dynamics simulations that chemically patterning a solid surface has an effect on the flow of an adjacent liquid. This fact is in stark contrast with predictions of classical fluid mechanics…
Bacterial processes ranging from gene expression to motility and biofilm formation are constantly challenged by internal and external noise. While the importance of stochastic fluctuations has been appreciated for chemotaxis, it is…
Bacillus subtilis biofilms were grown in laminar channel flow at wall shear stress spanning one order of magnitude ($\tau_w = 0.068$ Pa to $\tau_w = 0.67$ Pa). We monitor, non-invasively, the evolution of the three-dimensional distribution…
We study a minimal model involving two species of particles interacting via quorum-sensing rules. Combining simulations of the microscopic model and linear stability analysis of the associated coarse-grained field theory, we identify a…
The biopolymers actin and microtubules are often in an ongoing assembling/disassembling state far from thermal equilibrium. Above a critical density this leads to spatially periodic patterns, as shown by a scaling argument and in terms of a…
Active agents - like phoretic particles, bacteria, sperm, and cytoskeletal filaments in motility assays - show a large variety of motility-induced collective behaviors, such as aggregation, clustering and phase separation. The behavior of…
There are rich emergent phase behaviors in non-equilibrium active systems. Flocking and clustering are two representative dynamic phases. The relationship between these two phases is still unclear. In the paper, we numerically investigate…
Bacterial biofilms, surface-attached communities of cells, are in some respects similar to colloidal solids; both are densely packed with non-zero yield stresses. However, unlike non-living materials, bacteria reproduce and die, breaking…
Controlling the phases of matter is a challenge that spans from condensed materials to biological systems. Here, by imposing a geometric boundary condition, we study controlled collective motion of Escherichia coli bacteria. A circular…
Microbial ecosystems exhibit a surprising amount of functionally relevant diversity at all levels of taxonomic resolution, presenting a significant challenge for most modeling frameworks. A long-standing hope of theoretical ecology is that…
Bacterial growth environment strongly influences the efficacy of antibiotic treatment, with slow growth often being associated with decreased susceptibility. Yet in many cases the connection between antibiotic susceptibility and pathogen…
Microbial populations generally evolve in volatile environments, under conditions fluctuating between harsh and mild, e.g. as the result of sudden changes in toxin concentration or nutrient abundance. Environmental variability thus shapes…