Related papers: Emergence of active nematics in bacterial biofilms
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…
Bacterial colonies composed of elongated cells form active nematic fluids that spontaneously self-organise into ordered domains of aligned cells and exhibit self-generated chaotic flows powered by cell growth. While their dynamics have…
Living active collectives have evolved with remarkable self-patterning ability to meet the physical and biological constraints for growth and survival. However, how complex multicellular patterns emerge from a single founder cell remains…
Monolayers of growing non-motile rod-shaped bacteria act as active nematic materials composed of hard particles rather than the flexible components of other commonly studied active nematics. The organization of these granular monolayers has…
Bacterial biofilms collectively develop distinct and ordered structures, including fibers, bundles, and branches. Often, it is unclear how these structural motifs convey specific advantages to bacterial strains under challenging conditions.…
From multicellular tissues to bacterial colonies, three dimensional cellular structures arise through the interaction of cellular activities and mechanical forces. Simple bacterial communities provide model systems for analyzing such…
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…
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…
Biofilms are bacterial aggregates that grow on moist surfaces. Thin homogeneous biofilms naturally formed on the walls of conducts may serve as biosensors, providing information on the status of microsystems (MEMS) without disrupting them.…
Bacterial colonies growing on surfaces are shaped by mechanical stresses transmitted through the community, governed by the balance between cell growth and steric and cell-substrate interactions. Using overdamped dynamics simulations of…
Recent studies have shown that packings of cells, both eukaryotic cellular tissues and growing or swarming bacterial colonies, can often be understood as active nematic fluids. A key property of volume-conserving active nematic model…
Biofilms are complex, self-organized consortia of microorganisms that produce a functional, protective matrix of biomolecules. Physically, the structure of a biofilm can be described as an entangled polymer network which grows and changes…
Biofilms are communities of bacteria adhered to surfaces. Recently, biofilms of rod-shaped bacteria were observed at single-cell resolution and shown to develop from a disordered, two-dimensional layer of founder cells into a…
Soft surfaces, spanning vastly different environmental and biomedical settings, are frequently colonised by surface-associated bacteria. Yet, how soft surfaces govern bacterial dynamics and their self-organisation into colonies remains…
Bacterial colonies are abundant on living and nonliving surfaces and are known to mediate a broad range of processes in ecology, medicine, and industry. Although extensively researched, from single cells to demographic scales, a…
Bacterial growth and division generally occur by the process known as binary fission, in which the cells grow polarly until they divide into two daughter cells. Although this process is affected by factors that introduce stochastic…
Colonies of rod-shaped bacteria constitute a system of colloidal active matter with nematic properties. As a single initial bacterium multiplies through repeated divisions, the resulting colony quickly loses long-range orientational order,…
The physics of micron-scale biological colonies usually benefits from different out-of-equilibrium sources. In bacterial colonies and cellular tissues, the growth process is among the important active sources that determine the dynamics. In…
Collective behavior of bacterial colonies plays critical roles in adaptability, survivability, biofilm expansion and infection. We employ an individual-based model of an interstitial biofilm to study emergent pattern formation based on the…
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…