Related papers: Front-propagation in bacterial inter-colony commun…

Microorganisms employ sophisticated mechanisms for intercellular communication and environmental sensing, with quorum sensing serving as a fundamental regulatory process. Dysregulation of quorum sensing has been implicated in various…

Various bacterial strains exhibit colonial branching patterns during growth on poor substrates. These patterns reflect bacterial cooperative self-organization and cybernetic processes of communication, regulation and control employed during…

The spreading of bacterial populations is central to processes in agriculture, the environment, and medicine. However, existing models of spreading typically focus on cells in unconfined settings--despite the fact that many bacteria inhabit…

Bacteria populations rely on mechanisms such as quorum sensing to coordinate complex tasks that cannot be achieved by a single bacterium. Quorum sensing is used to measure the local bacteria population density, and it controls cooperation…

In nature, bacterial collectives typically consist of multiple species, which are interacting both biochemically and physically. Nonetheless, past studies on the physical properties of swarming bacteria were focused on axenic (single…

Various bacterial strains (e.g. strains belonging to the genera Bacillus, Paenibacillus, Serratia and Salmonella) exhibit colonial branching patterns during growth on poor semi-solid substrates. These patterns reflect the bacterial…

The dispersal of cells from an initially constrained location is a crucial aspect of many physiological phenomena ranging from morphogenesis to tumour spreading. In such processes, the way cell-cell interactions impact the motion of single…

The effect of mechanical interactions between cells in the spreading of bacterial populations was investigated in one-dimensional space. A continuum-mechanics approach, comprising cell migration, proliferation, and exclusion processes, was…

We study a generic model for quorum-sensing bacteria in circular confinement. Every bacterium produces signaling molecules, the local concentration of which triggers a response when a certain threshold is reached. If this response lowers…

Bacteria are easily characterizable model organisms with an impressively complicated set of capabilities. Among their capabilities is quorum sensing, a detailed cell-cell signaling system that may have a common origin with eukaryotic…

The role of activity on the hydrodynamic dispersion of bacteria in a model porous medium is studied by tracking thousands of bacteria in a microfluidic chip containing randomly placed pillars. We first evaluate the spreading dynamics of two…

Within the context of evolution, an altruistic act that benefits the receiving individual at the expense of the acting individual is a puzzling phenomenon. An extreme form of altruism can be found in colicinogenic E. coli. These suicidal…

Bacteria track chemical gradients using a biased random walk, a process called chemotaxis. Experiments suggest that bacteria also communicate during this process. Using a mathematical model, we find that sufficiently strong communication…

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…

Risk spreading in bacterial populations is generally regarded as a strategy to maximize survival. Here, we study its role during range expansion of a genetically diverse population where growth and motility are two alternative traits. We…

Molecular communication promises to enable communication between nanomachines with a view to increasing their functionalities and open up new possible applications. Due to some of the biological properties, bacteria have been proposed as a…

Communication and coordination play a major role in the ability of bacterial cells to adapt to ever changing environments and conditions. Recent work has shown that such coordination underlies several aspects of bacterial responses…

The social organization of microorganisms has long been a fascinating and challenging subject in both biology and sociology. In these organisms, the role of the individual is far less dominant than that of the community, which functions as…

Bacteria are prolific at colonizing diverse surfaces under a widerange of environmental conditions, and exhibit fascinating examples of self-organization across scales. Though it has recently attracted considerable interest, the role of…

Signal propagation over long distances is a ubiquitous feature of multicellular communities. In biofilms of the bacterium Bacillus subtilis, we recently discovered that some, but not all, cells participate in the propagation of an…