Related papers: How do biofilms feel their environment?
Mechanical forces are obviously important in the assembly of three-dimensional multicellular structures, but their detailed role is often unclear. We have used growing microcolonies of the bacterium \emph{Escherichia coli} to investigate…
Engineering spatially organized biofilms for creating adaptive and sustainable biomaterials is a forthcoming mission of synthetic biology. Existing technologies of patterning biofilm materials suffer limitations associated with the high…
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…
Interactions between microorganisms and solid boundaries play an important role in biological processes, like egg fertilisation, biofilm formation and soil colonisation, where microswimmers move within a structured environment. Despite…
Understanding non-equilibrium phenomena, such as growth, and connecting them to equilibrium phase behavior is a major challenge, in particular for complex multicomponent materials. We use X-ray reflectivity to determine the surface…
Silica-carbonate biomorphs are a class of emergent materials, i.e. composite microstructures made of nanometric carbonate crystallites surrounded by amorphous silica. They form via a co-precipitation process in an interplay between alkaline…
We report molecular dynamics simulation results on the equilibrium properties of polymer thin films adsorbed onto flat and curved substrates. We first systematically determine the contact angle of polymer droplets on flat substrates as a…
Bacterial cells navigate around their environment by directing their movement along chemical gradients. This process, known as chemotaxis, can promote the rapid expansion of bacterial populations into previously unoccupied territories.…
Culturing cells confined in microscale geometries has been reported in many studies this last decade, in particular following the development of microfluidic-based applications and lab-on-a-chip devices. Such studies usually examine growth…
The film thickness dependence of crystal growth is investigated for isotactic polystyrene (it-PS) in thin films, the thickness of which is from 20nm down to 4nm. The single crystals of it-PS grown at 180 in the ultrathin films show the…
The long-wave dynamics of liquid films on isothermal substrates show a dynamic competition between various physical mechanisms. If the destabilizing effect of thermocapillarity overcomes the stabilizing effect of surface tension and…
The search for biosignatures necessitates developing our understanding of life under different conditions. If life can influence the climate evolution of its planet then understanding the behaviour of life-climate feedbacks under extreme…
In recent decades, the growth of ultrathin epitaxial bismuth (Bi) films on various substrates has garnered interest due to their unique electronic properties. We report upon the growth and electrical transport properties of epitaxial Bi…
How adaptive evolution to one environmental stress improves or suppresses adaptation to another is an important problem in evolutionary biology. For instance, in microbiology, the evolution of bacteria to be resistant to different…
We present a model for a biological reactor in which bacteria tend to aggregate in flocs, as encountered in wastewater treatment plants. The influence of this flocculation on the growth dynamics of the bacteria is studied. We argue that a…
Living cells are soft bodies of a characteristic form, but endowed with a capacity for a steady turnover of their structures. Both of these material properties, i.e. recovery of the shape after an external stress has been imposed and…
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…
A cellular bleb grows when a portion of the cell membrane detaches from the underlying cortex under the influence of a cytoplasmic pressure. We develop a quantitative model for the growth and dynamics of these objects in a simple…
Changes in the dynamics of supported polymer films in comparison to bulk materials involve a complex convolution of effects, such as substrate interactions, roughness and compliance, in addition to film thickness. We consider molecular…
Two types of high-strength composite hydrogels possessing the structure of interpenetrating polymer networks were synthesized via free-radical polymerization of acrylamide carried out straight within the matrix of plant or bacterial…