Related papers: Microbial range expansions on liquid substrates
Microbial interactions regulate their spread and survival in competitive environments. It is not clear if the physical parameters of the environment regulate the outcome of these interactions. In this work, we show that the opportunistic…
The evolutionary success of bacteria lies in their ability to form complex surface-associated communities in diverse biophysical settings. However, it remains poorly understood how compliance of soft surfaces, measured in terms of their…
The growth and evolution of microbial populations is often subjected to advection by fluid flows in spatially extended environments, with immediate consequences for questions of spatial population genetics in marine ecology, planktonic…
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…
Fluid flow has a major effect on the aggregation and fragmentation of bacterial colonies. Yet, a generic framework to understand and predict how hydrodynamics affects colony size remains elusive. This study investigates how fluid flow…
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…
We study the growth of colonies of the yeast Pichia membranaefaciens on agarose film. The growth conditions are controlled in a setup where nutrients are supplied through an agarose film suspended over a solution of nutrients. As the…
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…
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…
How producers of public goods persist in microbial communities is a major question in evolutionary biology. Cooperation is evolutionarily unstable, since cheating strains can reproduce quicker and take over. Spatial structure has been shown…
Yeasts exist in communities that expand over space and time to form complex structures and patterns. We developed a computational lattice-based framework to perform spatial-temporal simulations of budding yeast colonies exposed to different…
An evolving yeast colony is simulated by means of a cellular automaton that takes care of many important features of the system under study. A complete survey of the properties of the colony is done and a set of scaling relations is found,…
Slicks are thin viscous films that can be found at the air--water interface of water bodies such as lakes, rivers and oceans. These micro-layers are enriched in surfactants, organic matter, and microorganisms, and exhibit steep physical and…
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…
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…
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…
Evolutionary experiments with microbes are a powerful tool to study mutations and natural selection. These experiments, however, are often limited to the well-mixed environments of a test tube or a chemostat. Since spatial organization can…
Unlike coffee and cream that homogenize when stirred, growing micro-organisms (e.g., bacteria, baker's yeast) can actively kill each other and avoid mixing. How do such antagonistic interactions impact the growth and survival of competing…
For non-motile microorganisms, spatial expansion in quiescent fluids is presumed to be limited by diffusion. We report that microbial colonies can explosively circumvent this constraint through a self-amplifying physical process. As…
In the growth of bacterial colonies, a great variety of complex patterns are observed in experiments, depending on external conditions and the bacterial species. Typically, existing models employ systems of reaction-diffusion equations or…