Related papers: Biofilms as self-shaping growing nematics

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…

Collective motion of self-propelled organisms or synthetic particles often termed active fluid has attracted enormous attention in broad scientific community because of it fundamentally non-equilibrium nature. Energy input and interactions…

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…

Monolayers of growing bacteria, confined within channel geometries, exhibit self-organization into a highly aligned laminar state along the axis of the channel. Although this phenomenon has been observed in experiments and simulations under…

Active nematic fluids exhibit complex dynamics in both bulk and in simple confining geometries. However, complex confining geometries could have substantial impact on active spontaneous flows. Using multiparticle collision dynamics…

Spontaneous growth of long-wavelength deformations is a defining feature of active fluids with orientational order. We investigate the effect of biaxial rectangular confinement on the instability of initially shear-aligned 3D isotropic…

Biofilms are communities of bacteria adhered to surfaces. Recently, biofilms of rod-shaped bacteria were observed at single-cell resolution and shown to develop from a disordered, two-dimensional layer of founder cells into a…

The alignment of fibers and cells in living tissues affect their mechanical properties and functionality. In this context, one can draw an analogy between tissues and nematic liquid crystal elastomers. We explore this analogy by growing…

Cells are fundamental building blocks of living organisms displaying an array of shapes, morphologies, and textures that encode specific functions and physical behaviors. Elucidating the rules of this code remains a challenge. In this work,…

Biofilms are spatially organized microorganism colonies embedded in a self-produced matrix, conferring to the microbial community resistance to environmental stresses. Motile bacteria have been observed swimming in the matrix of pathogenic…

Bacterial growth and division generally occur by the process known as binary fission, in which the cells grow polarly until they divide into two daughter cells. Although this process is affected by factors that introduce stochastic…

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…

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…

Natural bacterial habitats are often complex fluids with viscoelastic and anisotropic responses to stress; for example, they can take the form of liquid crystals (LCs), with elongated microscopic constituents that collectively align while…

Instabilities of fluid-fluid interfaces are ubiquitous in passive soft matter. Adding activity to the interface or either fluid can dramatically change the stability of the interface. Using experiment and theory, we investigate the…

We explore reshaping of nematoelastic films upon imbibing an isotropic solvent under conditions when isotropic and nematic phases coexist. The structure of the interphase boundary is computed taken into account the optimal nematic…

We develop a formal analogy between configurational stresses in two distinct physical systems, and study the flows that they induce when the configurations of interest include topological de- fects. The two systems in question are…

Physical properties of composite materials can be pre-engineered by controlling their structure and composition at the mesoscale. Yet, approaches for achieving this are limited and rarely scalable. We introduce a new breed of self-assembled…

Many active fluid systems encountered in biology are set in total geometric confinement. Cytoplasmic streaming in plant cells is a prominent and ubiquitous example, in which cargo-carrying molecular motors move along polymer filaments and…

Biofilms inhabit a range of environments, such as dental plaques or soil micropores, often characterized by intricate, non-even surfaces. However, the impact of surface irregularities on the population dynamics of biofilms remains elusive…