Related papers: 3D spatial exploration by E. coli echoes motor tem…
The bacterial flagellar motor is a highly efficient rotary machine used by many bacteria to propel themselves. It has recently been shown that at low speeds its rotation proceeds in steps [Sowa et al. (2005) Nature 437, 916--919]. Here we…
A multicomponent multiphase reactive transport simulator has been developed to facilitate the investigation of a large variety of phenomena in porous media including component transport, diffusion, microbiological growth and decay, cell…
Bacterial biofilms cost an enormous amount of resources in the health, medical, and industrial sectors. To understand early biofilm formation, beginning from planktonic states of active bacterial suspensions (such as Escherichia coli) to…
Bacteria commonly live in structured communities that affect human health and influence ecological systems. Heterogeneous populations, such as motile and non-motile populations, often coexist in bacteria communities. Motile subpopulations…
We study colonies of non-motile, rod-shaped bacteria growing on solid substrates. In our model, bacteria interact purely mechanically, by pushing each other away as they grow, and consume a diffusing nutrient. We show that mechanical…
We consider self-propelled particles undergoing run-and-tumble dynamics (as exhibited by E. coli) in one dimension. Building on previous analyses at drift-diffusion level for the one-particle density, we add both interactions and noise,…
Active particles such as swimming bacteria or self-propelled colloids are known to spontaneously organize into fascinating large-scale dynamic structures. The emergence of these collective states from the motility pattern of the individual…
We model an enclosed system of bacteria, whose motility-induced phase separation is coupled to slow population dynamics. Without noise, the system shows both static phase separation and a limit cycle, in which a rising global population…
Bacteria typically reside in heterogeneous environments with various chemogradients where motile cells can gain an advantage over non-motile cells. Since motility is energetically costly, cells must optimize their swimming speed and…
When treated with antibiotics below the minimum inhibitory concentration, bacterial cell division turns off, but cell growth does not. Thus, rod-like bacteria, including E. coli, can elongate many times their length without increasing their…
We study chemotaxis of a single {\sl E.coli} bacterium in a medium where the nutrient chemical is also undergoing diffusion and its concentration has the form of a Gaussian whose width increases with time. We measure the average first…
Bacterial conglomerates such as biofilms and microcolonies are ubiquitous in nature and play an important role in industry and medicine. In contrast to well-mixed, diluted cultures routinely used in microbial research, bacteria in a…
We have developed and implemented a numerical evolution scheme for a class of stochastic problems in which the temporal evolution occurs on widely-separated time scales, and for which the slow evolution can be described in terms of a small…
Isogenic Escherichia coli growing exponentially in a constant environment display large variation in growth-rates, division-sizes and generation-times. It is unclear how these seemingly random cell cycles can be reconciled with the precise…
We use moving light patterns to control the motion of {\it Escherichia coli} bacteria whose motility is photo-activated. Varying the pattern speed controls the magnitude and direction of the bacterial flux, and therefore the accumulation of…
The dynamics of growth of bacterial populations has been extensively studied for planktonic cells in well-agitated liquid culture, in which all cells have equal access to nutrients. In the real world, bacteria are more likely to live in…
Active matter consists of units that generate mechanical work by consuming energy. Examples include living systems, such as assemblies of bacteria and biological tissues, biopolymers driven by molecular motors, and suspensions of synthetic…
Peritrichous bacteria synchronize and bundle their flagella to actively swim while disruption of the bundle leads to tumbling. It is still not known whether the number of flagella represents an evolutionary adaptation towards optimizing…
In the chemotactic motion of Escherichia coli, the switching of transmembrane chemoreceptors between active and inactive states is one of the most important steps of the signaling pathway. We study the effect of this switching time-scale on…
Bacterial swarming is a rapid mass-migration, in which thousands of cells spread collectively to colonize a surface. Physically, swarming is a natural example of active particles that use energy to generate motion. Accordingly,…