Related papers: Biofilm Growth Under Elastic Confinement
Bacterial colonies are abundant on living and nonliving surfaces and are known to mediate a broad range of processes in ecology, medicine, and industry. Although extensively researched, from single cells to demographic scales, a…
Cell walls define a cell shape in bacteria. They are rigid to resist large internal pressures, but remarkably plastic to adapt to a wide range of external forces and geometric constraints. Currently, it is unknown how bacteria maintain…
Bacteria often develop distinct phenotypes to adapt to environmental stress. In particular, they can produce biofilms, dense communities of bacteria that live in a complex extracellular matrix. Bacterial biofilms provide a safe haven from…
The dynamics of biofilm lifecycle are deeply influenced by the surrounding environment and the interactions between sessile and planktonic phenotypes. Bacterial biofilms typically develop in three distinct stages: attachment of cells to a…
A hydrodynamic model is proposed to describe one of the most critical problems in intensive medical care units: the formation of biofilms inside central venous catheters. The incorporation of approximate solutions for the flow-limited…
Space-saving design is a requirement that is encountered in biological systems and the development of modern technological devices alike. Many living organisms dynamically pack their polymer chains, filaments or membranes inside of…
Bacterial biofilms, surface-attached communities of cells, are in some respects similar to colloidal solids; both are densely packed with non-zero yield stresses. However, unlike non-living materials, bacteria reproduce and die, breaking…
We model an enclosed system of bacteria, whose motility-induced phase separation is coupled to slow population dynamics. Without noise, the system shows both static phase separation and a limit cycle, in which a rising global population…
The dynamics of growth of bacterial populations has been extensively studied for planktonic cells in well-agitated liquid culture, in which all cells have equal access to nutrients. In the real world, bacteria are more likely to live in…
Surfaces formed by extracellular polymeric substances enclosing individual and some small communities of {\it Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans} on plates of hydrophobic silicon and hydrophilic mica are analyzed by means of atomic force…
Free boundaries of biofilms advancing on surfaces evolve according to conservation laws coupled with systems of partial differential equations for velocities, pressures and chemicals affecting cell behavior. Thin film approximations lead to…
Under hard-agar and nutrient-rich conditions, a cell of $Bacillus$ $subtilis$ grows as a single filament owing to the failure of cell separation after each growth and division cycle. The self-elongating filament of cells shows sequential…
To obtain crystalline thin films of alpha-Quartz represents a challenge due to the tendency for the material towards spherulitic growth. Thus, understanding the mechanisms that give rise to spherulitic growth can help regulate the growth…
The diffusion of particles in complex media has gained significant interest due to its dual relevance: probing the viscoelastic properties of materials via microrheology and assessing the extent of particle displacement over time. In this…
We consider a model of a thin film elastically attached to a rigid substrate. In the case in which the film expands relative to the substrate and assuming certain non-linear elastic behavior of the film, expansion ridges may appear, in…
We study non-equilibrium bacterial colony growth using a geometry-first, time-resolved analysis of morphology. From time-lapse microscopy data, we track the coupled evolution of area, perimeter, and boundary-sensitive shape descriptors…
Flagellar-driven locomotion plays a critical role in bacterial attachment and colonization of surfaces, contributing to the risks of contamination and infection. Tremendous attempts to uncover the underlying principles governing bacterial…
The growth dynamics of rigid biopolymers, consisting of $N$ parallel protofilaments, is investigated theoretically using simple approximate models. In our approach, the structure of a polymer's growing end and lateral interactions between…
A closed-form model is developed to evaluate the band-edge shift caused by quantum confinement for a two-dimensional non-parabolic carrier-pocket. Based on this model, the symmetries and the band-shifts of different carrier-pockets are…
We quantitatively study the transport of E. coli near the walls of confined microfluidic channels, and in more detail along the edges formed by the interception of two perpendicular walls. Our experiments establish the connection between…