Related papers: Is E. coli good at chemotaxis?
Gene-knockout experiments on single-cell organisms have established that expression of a substantial fraction of genes is not needed for optimal growth. This problem acquired a new dimension with the recent discovery that environmental and…
The rheological response under simple shear of an active suspension of Escherichia coli is determined in a large range of shear rates and concentrations. The effective viscosity and the time scales characterizing the bacterial organization…
Chemotaxis plays a crucial role in a variety of processes in biology and ecology. Quite often it acts to improve efficiency of biological reactions. One example is the immune system signalling, where infected tissues release chemokines…
Chemotaxis receptors in E. coli form clusters at the cell poles and also laterally along the cell body, and this clustering plays an important role in signal transduction. Recently, experiments using flourrescence imaging have shown that,…
Complex biological systems are very robust to genetic and environmental changes at all levels of organization. Many biological functions of Escherichia coli metabolism can be sustained against single-gene or even multiple-gene mutations by…
Bacterial processes ranging from gene expression to motility and biofilm formation are constantly challenged by internal and external noise. While the importance of stochastic fluctuations has been appreciated for chemotaxis, it is…
Diverse processes--e.g. bioremediation, biofertilization, and microbial drug delivery--rely on bacterial migration in disordered, three-dimensional (3D) porous media. However, how pore-scale confinement alters bacterial motility is unknown…
Motile bacteria are known to accumulate at surfaces, eventually leading to changes in bacterial motility and bio-film formation. We use a novel two-colour, three-dimensional Lagrangian tracking technique, to follow simultaneously the body…
The metabolic network plays a crucial role in regulating bacterial metabolism and growth, but it is subject to inherent molecular stochasticity. Previous studies have utilized flux balance analysis and the maximum entropy method to predict…
We study single cell E.coli chemotaxis in a spatio-temporally varying attractant environment. Modeling the attractant concentration in the form of a traveling sine wave, we measure in our simulations, the chemotactic drift velocity of the…
Escherichia coli and other bacteria use rotating helical filaments to swim. Each cell typically has about four filaments, which bundle or disperse depending on the sense of motor rotation. To study the bundling process, we built a…
Chemotaxis plays a crucial role in a variety of processes in biology and ecology. Quite often it acts to improve efficiency of biological reactions; one example is the immune system signalling, where infected tissues release chemokines…
Bacteria often exhibit upstream swimming, which can cause the contamination of biomedical devices and the infection of organs including the urethra or lungs. This process, called rheotaxis, has been studied extensively in Newtonian fluids.…
Bacteria can chemotactically migrate up attractant gradients by controlling run-and-tumble motility patterns. In addition to this well-known chemotactic behaviour, several soil and marine bacterial species perform chemokinesis: they adjust…
A mathematical model of Min oscillation in Escherichia coli is numerically studied. The oscillatory state and hysteretic transition are explained with simpler coupled differential equations. Next, we propose a simple model of cell growth…
Various rod-shaped bacteria such as the canonical gram negative Escherichia coli or the well-studied gram positive Bacillus subtilis divide symmetrically after they approximately double their volume. Their size at division is not constant,…
Peritrichously-flagellated bacteria, such as Escherichia coli, self-propel in fluids by using specialised motors to rotate multiple helical filaments. The rotation of each motor is transmitted to a short flexible segment called the hook…
Bacterial chemotaxis is one of the most extensively studied adaptive responses in cells. Many bacteria are able to bias their apparently random motion to produce a drift in the direction of the increasing chemoattractant concentration. It…
Cells swimming in confined environments are attracted by surfaces. We measure the steady-state distribution of smooth-swimming bacteria (Escherichia coli) between two glass plates. In agreement with earlier studies, we find a strong…
We use moving light patterns to control the motion of {\it Escherichia coli} bacteria whose motility is photo-activated. Varying the pattern speed controls the magnitude and direction of the bacterial flux, and therefore the accumulation of…