Related papers: Bacteria optimize tumble bias to strategically nav…
Escherichia coli has long been used as a model organism due to the extensive experimental characterization of its pathways and molecular components. Take chemotaxis as an example, which allows bacteria to sense and swim in response to…
Bacterial suspensions--a premier example of active fluids--show an unusual response to shear stresses. Instead of increasing the viscosity of the suspending fluid, the emergent collective motions of swimming bacteria can turn a suspension…
Bacterial swimming is well characterized in uniform liquids at rest. The natural habitat of bacterial swimmers, however, is often dominated by moving fluids and interfaces, resulting in shear flows that may strongly alter bacterial…
Nutrient limitation is one of the most common triggers of antibiotic tolerance and persistence. Here, we present two microfluidic setups to study how spatial and temporal variation in nutrient availability lead to increased survival of…
Flagellated bacteria are hydrodynamically attracted to rigid walls, yet past work shows a 'hovering' state where they swim stably at a finite height above surfaces. We use numerics and theory to reveal the physical origin of hovering.…
We study the surface diffusion of the model cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC $6803$ during the incipient stages of cell contact with a glass surface in the dilute regime. We observe a twitching motility with alternating immobile…
Microswimmers such as E. Coli bacteria accumulate and exhibit an intriguing dynamics near walls, governed by hydrodynamic and steric interactions. Insight into the underlying mechanisms and predominant interactions demand a detailed…
Randomly moving active particles can be herded into directed motion by asymmetric geometric structures. Although such a rectification process has been extensively studied due to its fundamental, biological, and technological relevance, a…
Active systems comprised of self-propelled units show fascinating transitions from Brownian-like dynamics to collective coherent motion. Swirling of swimming bacteria is a spectacular example. This study demonstrates that a nematic liquid…
Chemotaxis of bacterial swimmers that move in a run-and-turn pattern is well studied in uniform bulk fluid. It is primarily based on modulating the run time in dependence on the swimming direction with respect to the source of…
We study chemotaxis of a single {\sl E.coli} bacterium in a medium where the nutrient chemical is also undergoing diffusion and its concentration has the form of a Gaussian whose width increases with time. We measure the average first…
Microorganisms are ubiquitous in nature and technology. They inhabit diverse environments ranging from small river tributaries and lakes to oceans, as well as wastewater treatment plants and food manufacturing. In many of these…
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,…
When treated with antibiotics below the minimum inhibitory concentration, bacterial cell division turns off, but cell growth does not. Thus, rod-like bacteria, including E. coli, can elongate many times their length without increasing their…
Hypothesis: Bacterial contamination of surfaces poses a major threat to public health. Designing effective antibacterial or self-cleaning surfaces requires understanding how bacteria-laden droplets interact with solid substrates and how…
Cleaning surfaces with bubbles has been a topic of discussion in recent years due to the growing interest in sustainable methods for cleaning. Specifically, a method of using air bubbles to sanitize agricultural produce has been proposed as…
We provide a detailed stochastic description of the swimming motion of an E.coli bacterium in two dimension, where we resolve tumble events in time. For this purpose, we set up two Langevin equations for the orientation angle and speed…
Peritrichous bacteria synchronize and bundle their flagella to actively swim while disruption of the bundle leads to tumbling. It is still not known whether the number of flagella represents an evolutionary adaptation towards optimizing…
Turbulence is ubiquitous, from oceanic currents to small-scale biological and quantum systems. Self-sustained turbulent motion in microbial suspensions presents an intriguing example of collective dynamical behavior amongst the simplest…
Colonies of bacteria grown on thin agar plate exhibit fractal patterns as a result of adaptation to their environments. The bacterial colony pattern formation is regulated crucially by chemotaxis, the movement of cells along a chemical…