Related papers: Evolution of chemotactic hitchhiking
Mutation rate is a key determinant of the pace as well as outcome of evolution, and variability in this rate has been shown in different scenarios to play a key role in evolutionary adaptation and resistance evolution under stress caused by…
Bacterial chemotaxis is one of the most extensively studied adaptive responses in cells. Many bacteria are able to bias their apparently random motion to produce a drift in the direction of the increasing chemoattractant concentration. It…
Heterogeneous systems of active matter exhibit a range of complex emergent dynamical patterns. In particular, it is difficult to predict the properties of the mixed system based on its constituents. These considerations are particularly…
In nature, microorganisms must often cope with hostile environmental conditions. To do so they have developed sophisticated cooperative behavior and intricate communication capabilities, such as: direct cell-cell physical interactions via…
Many chemotactic bacteria inhabit environments in which chemicals appear as localized pulses and evolve by processes such as diffusion and mixing. We show that, in such environments, physical limits on the accuracy of temporal gradient…
In nature, bacterial collectives typically consist of multiple species, which are interacting both biochemically and physically. Nonetheless, past studies on the physical properties of swarming bacteria were focused on axenic (single…
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…
Motility is a fundamental survival strategy of bacteria to navigate porous environments. Swimming cells thrive in quiescent wetlands and sediments at the bottom of the marine water column, where they mediate many essential biogeochemical…
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…
Here, we study the evolution of specialization using realistic computer simulations of bacteria that secrete two public goods in a dynamic fluid. Through this first principles approach, we find physical factors such as diffusion, flow…
Chemotactic bacteria have been observed to congregate into highly regular patterns. When the bacteria are placed in the center of a dish, a wave of bacteria can travel outward, leaving a regular pattern of spots or stripes in its wake.…
In systems as diverse as migrating mammals to road traffic, crowding acts to inhibit efficient collective movement. Bacteria, however, are observed to move in very dense groups containing billions of individuals without causing the gridlock…
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…
The bacterium E.Coli swims in a zig-zag manner, in a series of straight runs and tumbles occurring alternately, with the run-durations dependent on the local spatial gradient of chemo-attractants/repellants. This enables the organism to…
Chemotaxis of the bacterium Escherichia coli is well understood in shallow chemical gradients, but its swimming behavior remains difficult to interpret in steep gradients. By focusing on single-cell trajectories from simulations, we…
Single-cell organisms and various cell types use a range of motility modes when following a chemical gradient, but it is unclear which mode is best suited for different gradients. Here, we model directional decision-making in chemotactic…
Motivated by observations of the dynamics of {\it Myxococcus xanthus}, we present a self-interacting random walk model that describes the competition between chemokinesis and chemotaxis. Cells are constrained to move in one dimension, but…
We study single cell E.coli chemotaxis in a spatio-temporally varying attractant environment. Modeling the attractant concentration in the form of a traveling sine wave, we measure in our simulations, the chemotactic drift velocity of the…
Swimming bacteria detect chemical gradients by performing temporal comparisons of recent measurements of chemical concentration. These comparisons are described quantitatively by the chemotactic response function, which we expect 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…