Related papers: A biophysical threshold for biofilm formation
Biofilms are complex, self-organized consortia of microorganisms that produce a functional, protective matrix of biomolecules. Physically, the structure of a biofilm can be described as an entangled polymer network which grows and changes…
Biofilms are communities of bacteria that exhibit a multitude of multiscale biomechanical behaviors. Recent experimental advances have lead to characterizations of these behaviors in terms of measurements of the viscoelastic moduli of…
Bacterial biofilms are usually assumed to originate from individual cells deposited on a surface. However, many biofilm-forming bacteria tend to aggregate in the planktonic phase so that it is possible that many natural and infectious…
Several bacteria and bacteria strands form biofilms in different environmental conditions, e.g. pH, temperature, nutrients, etc. Biofilm growth, therefore, is an extremely robust process. Because of this, while biofilm growth is a complex…
The bacterium {\em Bacilus subtilis} frequently forms biofilms at the interface between the culture medium and the air. We develop a mathematical model that couples a description of bacteria as individual discrete objects to the standard…
Bacteria organize in a variety of collective states, from swarming, which has been attributed to rapid surface exploration, to biofilms, which are highly dense immobile communities attributed to stress resistance. It has been suggested that…
Bacteria generally live in complicated structures called biofilms, consisting of communicating bacterial colonies and extracellular polymeric substance (EPS). Since biofilms are related to detrimental effects such as infection or antibiotic…
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…
Biofilms are ubiquitous macro-colonies of bacteria that develop at various interfaces (solid-liquid, solid-gas or liquid-gas). The formation of biofilms starts with the attachment of individual bacteria to an interface, where they…
The formation of bacterial biofilms on solid surfaces within a fluid starts when bacteria attach to the substrate. Understanding environmental factors affecting the attachment and the early stages of the biofilm development as well as the…
Bacterial communities such as biofilms are widely recognised as being important for survival and persistence of bacteria in harsh environments. Mechanistic models of biofilm growth indicate that the way in which the surface is seeded can…
The spatial organization of bacteria in dense biofilms is key to their collective behaviour, and understanding it will be important for medical and technological applications. Here we study the morphology of a compact biofilm that undergoes…
Collective behavior of bacterial colonies plays critical roles in adaptability, survivability, biofilm expansion and infection. We employ an individual-based model of an interstitial biofilm to study emergent pattern formation based on the…
From multicellular tissues to bacterial colonies, three dimensional cellular structures arise through the interaction of cellular activities and mechanical forces. Simple bacterial communities provide model systems for analyzing such…
Many organisms form colonies for a transient period of time to withstand environmental pressure. Bacterial biofilms are a prototypical example of such behavior. Despite significant interest across disciplines, physical mechanisms governing…
Biofilms are complex structures which are inhabited by numerous amount of different species of microorganisms. Due to their ubiquity, they influence human life on an everyday basis. It is therefore important to understand the interactions…
The dynamics of cellular aggregates is driven by the interplay of mechanochemical processes and cellular activity. Although deterministic models may capture mechanical features, local chemical fluctuations trigger random cell responses,…
The transition from monolayers to multilayered structures in bacterial colonies is a fundamental step in biofilm development. Observed across different morphotypes and species, this transition is triggered within freely growing bacterial…
We propose a general parametrizable model to capture the dynamic interaction among bacteria in the formation of micro-colonies. micro-colonies represent the first social step towards the formation of structured multicellular communities…
We derive a physiologically structured multiscale model for biofilm development. The model has components on two spatial scales, which induce different time scales into the problem. The macroscopic behavior of the system is modeled using…