Related papers: The colon-pile
Self-Organized Criticality is the emergence of long-ranged spatio-temporal correlations in non-equilibrium steady states of slowly driven systems without fine tuning of any control parameter. Sandpiles were proposed as prototypical examples…
Bacteria can adjust the structure of colonies and biofilms to enhance their survival rate under external stress. Here, we explore the link between bacterial interaction forces and colony structure. We show that the activity of extracellular…
A mean-field sandpile model that exhibits self-organized criticality (SOC) despite violation of the grain-transfer conservation law during avalanches is proposed. The sandpile consists of $N$ agents and possesses background activity with…
Colonies of bacteria grown on thin agar plate exhibit fractal patterns as a result of adaptation to their environments. The bacterial colony pattern formation is regulated crucially by chemotaxis, the movement of cells along a chemical…
How systems are endowed with migration capacity is a fascinating question with implications ranging from the design of novel active systems to the control of microbial populations. Bacteria, which can be found in a variety of environments,…
The self-organization of microbial ecosystems involves a large variety of mechanisms, ranging from biochemical signaling to population dynamics. Among these, the role of motility regulation has been little studied, despite the importance of…
We study the growth of a population of bacteria in a dynamical hostile environment corresponding to the immune system of the colonised organism. The immune cells evolve as subcritical open clusters of oriented percolation and are…
To explore the coupling between a growing population of microorganisms such as E. coli and a nonuniform nutrient distribution, we formulate a minimalistic model. It consists of active Brownian particles that divide and grow at a…
The emergent spatial patterns generated by growing bacterial colonies have been the focus of intense study in physics during the last twenty years. Both experimental and theoretical investigations have made possible a clear qualitative…
Segregation of populations is a key question in evolution theory. One important aspect is the relation between spatial organization and the population's composition. Here we study a specific example -- sectors in expanding bacterial…
We study the clustering of a model cyanobacterium \textit{Synechocystis} into microcolonies. The bacteria are allowed to diffuse onto surfaces of different hardness, and interact with the others by aggregation and detachment. We find that…
Many active systems are capable of forming intriguing patterns at scales significantly larger than the size of their individual constituents. Cyanobacteria are one of the most ancient and important phyla of organisms that has allowed the…
During colony growth, complex interactions regulate the bacterial orientation, leading to the formation of large-scale ordered structures, including topological defects and microdomains. These structures may benefit bacterial strains,…
Immotile microbes inhabit nearly every environment on Earth, from soils and sediments to food matrices -- yet how they disperse through these physically confining environments is poorly understood. Here, we show that immotile microbial…
Adaptive control in biological systems, such as intestinal immunity, remains poorly understood despite detailed knowledge of underlying regulatory networks. We propose an alternative framework based on stochastic martingale turnover, in…
Navigation of microorganisms is controlled by internal processes ultimately sensitive to mechanical or chemical signaling encountered along the path. In many natural environments, such as porous soils or physiological ducts, motile species…
The self-organized critical state is characterized by a power law distribution of cluster sizes and other properties. However experiments with sand and rice piles reveal distributions of avalanche sizes which are not power law distributed.…
We propose a simple "evolutionary" sandpile model exhibiting self-organised criticality and exactly $1/f$-noise (i.e. the critical exponent is equal to $-1$) and observe emergent phenomena of the same type self-organised criticality on the…
We introduce two sandpile models which show the same behavior of real sandpiles, that is, an almost self-organized critical behavior for small systems and the dominance of large avalanches as the system size increases. The systems become…
Under special conditions bacteria excrete an attractant and aggregate. The high density regions initially collapse into cylindrical structures, which subsequently destabilize and break up into spherical aggregates. This paper presents a…