Related papers: The colon-pile
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…
We have recorded the swarming-like collective migration of a large number of keratocytes (tissue cells obtained from the scales of goldfish) using long-term videomicroscopy. By increasing the overall density of the migrating cells, we have…
Microbiology is the science of microbes, particularly bacteria. Many bacteria are motile: they are capable of self-propulsion. Among these, a significant class execute so-called run-and-tumble motion: they follow a fairly straight path for…
Microorganisms are ubiquitous in nature and technology. They inhabit diverse environments ranging from small river tributaries and lakes to oceans, as well as wastewater treatment plants and food manufacturing. In many of these…
Chirality in shape and motility can evolve rapidly in microbes and cancer cells. To determine how chirality affects cell fitness, we developed a model of chiral growth in compact aggregates such as microbial colonies and solid tumors. Our…
Two species with similar resource requirements respond in a characteristic way to variations in their habitat -- their abundances rise and fall in concert. We use this idea to learn how bacterial populations in the microbiota respond to…
The motion of cells in tissues is an ubiquitous phenomenon. In particular, in monolayered cell colonies in vitro, pronounced collective behavior with swirl-like motion has been observed deep within a cell colony, while at the same time, the…
Escherichia coli and other bacteria use rotating helical filaments to swim. Each cell typically has about four filaments, which bundle or disperse depending on the sense of motor rotation. To study the bundling process, we built a…
Recent investigations have provided important insights into the complex structure and dynamics of collectively moving flocks of living organisms. Two intriguing observations are, scale-free correlations in the velocity fluctuations, in the…
A popular theory of self-organized criticality relates the critical behavior of driven dissipative systems to that of systems with conservation. In particular, this theory predicts that the stationary density of the abelian sandpile model…
Fungal colonies are able to exhibit different morphologies depending on the enviromental conditions. This allows them to cope with and adapt to external changes. When grown in solid or semi-solid media the bulk of the colony is compact and…
The collective motion of bacterial cells in a shallow circular pool is systematically studied using the bacterial species $Bacillus$ $subtilis$. The ratio of cell length to pool diameter (i.e., the reduced cell length) ranges from 0.06 to…
Unraveling bacterial strategies for spatial exploration is crucial for understanding the complexity in the organization of life. Bacterial motility determines the spatio-temporal structure of microbial communities, controls infection…
It is widely accepted that population genetics theory is the cornerstone of evolutionary analyses. Empirical tests of the theory, however, are challenging because of the complex relationships between space, dispersal, and evolution.…
We consider a system of interacting Moran models with seed-banks. Individuals live in colonies and are subject to resampling and migration as long as they are $active$. Each colony has a seed-bank into which individuals can retreat to…
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…
How motile bacteria move near a surface is a problem of fundamental biophysical interest and is key to the emergence of several phenomena of biological, ecological and medical relevance, including biofilm formation. Solid boundaries can…
In the present work we simulate the basic two-dimensional dynamics of swarming E. coli bacteria on the surface of a moderately soft agar plate. Individual bacteria are modelled by self-propelled ridged bodies (agents), which interact with…
A number of biological processes, such as embryo development, cancer metastasis or wound healing, rely on cells moving in concert. The mechanisms leading to the emergence of coordinated motion remain however largely unexplored. Although…
We consider self-propelled particles undergoing run-and-tumble dynamics (as exhibited by E. coli) in one dimension. Building on previous analyses at drift-diffusion level for the one-particle density, we add both interactions and noise,…