Related papers: Emergent pattern formation in an interstitial biof…
In growing active matter systems, a large collection of engineered or living autonomous units metabolize free energy and create order at different length scales as they proliferate and migrate collectively. One such example is bacterial…
Bacteria organize in a variety of collective states, from swarming, which has been attributed to rapid surface exploration, to biofilms, which are highly dense immobile communities attributed to stress resistance. It has been suggested that…
Formation of bacterial colonies as biofilm on the surface/interface of various objects has the potential to impact not only human health and disease but also energy and environmental considerations. Biofilms can be regarded as soft…
Biofilms are communities of bacteria that exhibit a multitude of multiscale biomechanical behaviors. Recent experimental advances have lead to characterizations of these behaviors in terms of measurements of the viscoelastic moduli of…
Bacterial colonies are a well-known example of living active matter, exhibiting collective behaviors such as nematic alignment and collective motion that play an important role in the spread of microbial infections. While the underlying…
Biofilms are bacterial aggregates encased in a self-produced polymeric matrix which attach to moist surfaces and are extremely resistant to chemicals and antibiotics. Recent experiments show that their structure is defined by the interplay…
During colony growth, complex interactions regulate the bacterial orientation, leading to the formation of large-scale ordered structures, including topological defects and microdomains. These structures may benefit bacterial strains,…
Models based on surfactant driven instabilities have been employed to describe pattern formation by swarming bacteria. However, by definition, such models cannot account for the effect of bacterial sensing and decision making. Here we…
Bacteria build multicellular communities termed biofilms, which are often encased in a self-secreted extracellular matrix that gives the community mechanical strength and protection against harsh chemicals. How bacteria assemble distinct…
Bacteria can form a great variety of spatially heterogeneous cell density patterns, ranging from simple concentric rings to dynamical spiral waves appearing in growing colonies. These pattern formation phenomena are important as they…
Biofilms are antibiotic-resistant bacterial aggregates that grow on moist surfaces and can trigger hospital-acquired infections. They provide a classical example in biology where the dynamics of cellular communities may be observed and…
Growing tissue and bacterial colonies are active matter systems where cell divisions and cellular motion generate active stress. Although they operate in the non-equilibrium regime, these biological systems can form large-scale ordered…
Bacterial biofilms are usually assumed to originate from individual cells deposited on a surface. However, many biofilm-forming bacteria tend to aggregate in the planktonic phase so that it is possible that many natural and infectious…
A bacterial biofilm is an aggregate of micro-organisms growing fixed onto a solid surface, rather than floating freely in a liquid. Biofilms play a major role in various practical situations such as surgical infections and water treatment.…
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…
Active nematics are the nonequilibrium analog of passive liquid crystals in which anisotropic units consume free energy to drive emergent behavior. Similar to liquid crystal (LC) molecules in displays, ordering and dynamics in active…
The bacterium {\em Bacilus subtilis} frequently forms biofilms at the interface between the culture medium and the air. We develop a mathematical model that couples a description of bacteria as individual discrete objects to the standard…
The spreading of bacterial colonies at solid-air interfaces is determined by the physico-chemical properties of the involved interfaces. The production of surfactant molecules by bacteria is a widespread strategy that allows the colony to…
During development, organisms acquire three-dimensional shapes with important physiological consequences. While the basic mechanisms underlying morphogenesis are known in eukaryotes, it is often difficult to manipulate them in vivo. To…
Biofilms are spatially organized microorganism colonies embedded in a self-produced matrix, conferring to the microbial community resistance to environmental stresses. Motile bacteria have been observed swimming in the matrix of pathogenic…