Related papers: How do biofilms feel their environment?
Using a microfluidic trap, we study the behavior of individual phospholipid vesicles in contact with fatty acids. We show that spontaneous fatty acids insertion inside the bilayer is controlled by the vesicle size, osmotic pressure…
Bacterial biofilms cost an enormous amount of resources in the health, medical, and industrial sectors. To understand early biofilm formation, beginning from planktonic states of active bacterial suspensions (such as Escherichia coli) to…
We present a model for unicellular algal growth as motivated by several experiments implicating the importance of calcium ions and ``loosening'' enzymes in morphogenesis. A growing cell at rest in a diffusive calcium solution is viewed as…
We investigate the stress-driven morphological instability of epitaxially growing multilayer films, which are coherent and dislocation-free. We construct a direct elastic analysis, from which we determine the elastic state of the system…
Understanding how growth induces form is a longstanding biological question. Many studies concentrated on the shapes of plant cells, fungi or bacteria. Some others have shown the importance of the mechanical properties of bacterial walls…
Toxic cyanobacterial blooms are a growing environmental concern that affects freshwater ecosystems, drinking water supplies, and public health. The cyanobacterium Microcystis is among the most important bloom forming species. It often grows…
The growth of crystals confined in porous or cellular materials is ubiquitous in Nature and industry. Confinement affects the formation of biominerals in living organisms, of minerals in the Earth's crust and of salt crystals damaging…
We experimentally investigate how aerotactic bacteria, confined within a thin liquid film between two solid substrates, respond to a controlled oxygen gradient. We find that the total bacterial number density dictates which mechanism…
Glasses have a wide range of technological applications. The recent discovery of ultrastable glasses that are obtained by depositing the vapor of a glass-forming liquid onto the surface of a cold substrate has sparked renewed interest in…
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…
The buckling of a soft elastic sample under growth or swelling has highlighted a new interest in materials science, morphogenesis, and biology or physiology. Indeed, the change of mass or volume is a common fact of any living species, and…
Highly textured chalcogenide films have recently gained significant interest for phase-change memory applications. Several reports have highlighted that programming efficiency improves in devices featuring superlattice stacks, such as…
It is shown how the combination of atomic deposition and nonlinear diffusion may lead, below a critical temperature, to the growth of nonuniform layers on a substrate. The dynamics of such a system is of the Cahn-Hilliard type, supplemented…
We consider two thin layers of immiscible liquids on a heated solid horizontal substrate. The free liquid-liquid and liquid-gas interfaces of such a two-layer (or bilayer) liquid film may be unstable due to effective molecular interactions…
Tissue growth kinetics and interface dynamics depend on the properties of the tissue environment and cell-cell interactions. In cellular environments, substrate heterogeneity and geometry arise from a variety factors, such as the structure…
We introduce a general theoretical framework to study the shape dynamics of actively growing and remodeling surfaces. Using this framework we develop a physical model for growing bacterial cell walls and study the interplay of cell shape…
Ever since the first successful synthesis of stanene via epitaxial growth, numerous efforts have been devoted to improving its overall quality and exploring its topological and other exotic properties under different growth conditions.…
How particles are deposited at the edge of evaporating droplets, i.e. the {\em coffee ring} effect, plays a crucial role in phenomena as diverse as thin-film deposition, self-assembly, and biofilm formation. Recently, microorganisms have…
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,…
Bacteria can spontaneously develop collective motions by aligning their motions in dense systems. Here, we show that bacteria can also respond collectively to an alternating electrical field and form dynamic clusters oscillating at the same…