Related papers: Spatiotemporal Self-Organization of Fluctuating Ba…
Advances in synthetic biology allow us to engineer bacterial collectives with pre-specified characteristics. However, the behavior of these collectives is difficult to understand, as cellular growth and division as well as extra-cellular…
Filamentous cyanobacteria can show fascinating examples of nonequilibrium self-organization, which however are not well-understood from a physical perspective. We investigate the motility and collective organization of colonies of these…
Motility is a fundamental survival strategy of bacteria to navigate porous environments. Swimming cells thrive in quiescent wetlands and sediments at the bottom of the marine water column, where they mediate many essential biogeochemical…
Cooperative behavior is widespread in nature, even though cooperating individuals always run the risk to be exploited by free-riders. Population structure effectively promotes cooperation given that a threshold in the level of cooperation…
A mathematical model of Min oscillation in Escherichia coli is numerically studied. The oscillatory state and hysteretic transition are explained with simpler coupled differential equations. Next, we propose a simple model of cell growth…
In this paper we study the dynamics of stochastic microorganism flocculation models. Given the strong influence of environmental and seasonal fluctuations that are present in these models, we propose a stochastic model that includes…
We suggest that ensembles of self-replicating entities such as biological systems naturally evolve into a self-organized critical state in which fluctuations, as well as waiting-times between phase transitions are distributed according to a…
Periodic reversals of the direction of motion in systems of self-propelled rod shaped bacteria enable them to effectively resolve traffic jams formed during swarming and maximize their swarming rate. In this paper, a connection is found…
Certain bacteria form filamentous colonies when the cells fail to separate after dividing. In Bacillus subtilis, Bacillus thermus, and cyanobacteria, the filaments can wrap into complex supercoiled structures as the cells grow. The…
Motile bacteria can migrate along chemical gradients in a process known as chemotaxis. When exposed to uniform environmental stress, Escherichia coli cells coordinate their chemotactic responses to form millimeter-sized condensates…
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…
We study the effect of discreteness on various models for patterning in bacterial colonies. In a bacterial colony with branching pattern, there are discrete entities - bacteria - which are only two orders of magnitude smaller than the…
Collective cell migration lies at the intersection of developmental biology and non-equilibrium physics, where active processes give rise to emergent patterns that are biologically relevant. Here, we investigate dilatational modes--cycles…
Non-motile elongated bacteria confined in two-dimensional open micro-channels can exhibit collective motion and form dense monolayers with nematic order if the cells proliferate, i.e., grow and divide. Using soft molecular dynamics…
Engineering spatially organized biofilms for creating adaptive and sustainable biomaterials is a forthcoming mission of synthetic biology. Existing technologies of patterning biofilm materials suffer limitations associated with the high…
Heterogeneous systems of active matter exhibit a range of complex emergent dynamical patterns. In particular, it is difficult to predict the properties of the mixed system based on its constituents. These considerations are particularly…
Bacteria and plankton populations living in oceans and lakes reproduce and die under the in- fluence of turbulent currents. Turbulent transport interacts in a complex way with the dynamics of populations because the typical reproduction…
The segregation of plasmids in a bacterial population is investigated. Hereby, a dynamical model is formulated in terms of a size-structured population using a hyperbolic partial differential equation incorporating non-local terms (the…
Proliferation is a defining feature of life. Through growth, division, and death, living systems consume energy and inject mass, breaking conservation laws and driving collective phenomena from biofilm formation to embryonic development.…
Bacteria live in environments that are continuously fluctuating and changing. Exploiting any predictability of such fluctuations can lead to an increased fitness. On longer timescales bacteria can "learn" the structure of these fluctuations…