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Plants and insects communicate using chemical signals like volatile organic compounds (VOCs). A plant encodes information using different blends of VOCs, which propagate through the air to represent different symbolic information. This…
Conjugation accelerates bacterial evolution by enabling bacteria to acquire genes horizontally from their neighbors. Plasmid donors must physically encounter and connect with recipients to allow plasmid transfer, and different environments…
Quorum sensing is a decentralized biological process, through which a community of cells with no global awareness coordinate their functional behaviors based solely on cell-medium interactions and local decisions. This paper draws…
Diverse processes--e.g. bioremediation, biofertilization, and microbial drug delivery--rely on bacterial migration in disordered, three-dimensional (3D) porous media. However, how pore-scale confinement alters bacterial motility is unknown…
We analyze the coalescing model where a `primary' colony grows and randomly emits secondary colonies that spread and eventually coalesce with it. This model describes population proliferation in theoretical ecology, tumor growth and is also…
Over the past few decades, the research community has been interested in the study of multi-agent systems and their emerging collective dynamics. These systems are all around us in nature, like bacterial colonies, fish schools, bird flocks,…
Bacterial populations that colonize a host play important roles in host health, including serving as a reservoir that transmits to other hosts and from which invasive strains emerge, thus emphasizing the importance of understanding rates of…
Numerous natural systems depend on the sedimentation of passive particles in presence of swimming microorganisms. Here, we investigate the dynamics of the sedimentation of spherical colloids at various E. coli concentration within the…
As cells grow and divide under a given environment, they become crowded and resources are limited, as seen in bacterial biofilms and multicellular aggregates. These cells often show strong interactions through exchanging chemicals, as in…
Biological systems are promising substrates for computation because they naturally process environmental information through complex internal dynamics. In this study, we investigate whether bacterial metabolic models can act as physical…
Conjugation is the primary mechanism of horizontal gene transfer that spreads antibiotic resistance among bacteria. Although conjugation normally occurs in surface-associated growth (e.g., biofilms), it has been traditionally studied in…
We investigate the effects of cooperativity between contagion processes that spread and persist in a host population. We propose and analyze a dynamical model in which individuals that are affected by one transmissible agent $A$ exhibit a…
Mechanical stresses stemming from environmental factors are a key determinant of cellular behavior and physiology. Yet, the role of self-induced biomechanical stresses in growing bacterial colonies has remained largely unexplored. Here, we…
Human sociality depends upon the benefits of mutual aid and extensive communication. However mutual aid is made difficult by the problems of coordinating diverse norms and preferences, and communication is harried by substantial ambiguity…
Bacteria commonly inhabit porous environments such as host tissues, soil, and marine sediments, where complex geometries constrain and redirect their motion. Although bacterial motility has been studied in porous media, the roles of cell…
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…
Spreading of bacteria in a highly advective, disordered environment is examined. Predictions of super-diffusive spreading for a simplified reaction-diffusion equation are tested. Concentration profiles display anomalous growth and…
A variety of living and non-living systems exhibit collective motion. From swarm robotics to bacterial swarms, and tissue wound healing to human crowds, examples of collective motion are highly diverse but all of them share the common…
Escherichia coli has long been used as a model organism due to the extensive experimental characterization of its pathways and molecular components. Take chemotaxis as an example, which allows bacteria to sense and swim in response to…
Most of zoonoses are multi-host parasites with multiple transmission routes that are usually investigated separately despite their potential interplay. As a unifying framework for modelling parasite spread through different paths of…