Related papers: Shaping nematic order in bacterial films with sing…
Engineering spatially organized biofilms for creating adaptive and sustainable biomaterials is a forthcoming mission of synthetic biology. Existing technologies of patterning biofilm materials suffer limitations associated with the high…
Colonies of the social bacterium Myxococcus xanthus go through a morphological transition from a thin colony of cells to three-dimensional droplet-like fruiting bodies as a strategy to survive starvation. The biological pathways that…
Bacteria can form a great variety of spatially heterogeneous cell density patterns, ranging from simple concentric rings to dynamical spiral waves appearing in growing colonies. These pattern formation phenomena are important as they…
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…
We study the collective dynamics of elongated swimmers in a very thin fluid layer by devising long, filamentous, non-tumbling bacteria. The strong confinement induces weak nematic alignment upon collision, which, for large enough density of…
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…
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…
Cell alignment often forms nematic order, which can lead to anomalous collective cell flow due to the so-called active force. Although it is appreciated that cell migration is driven by traction force, a quantitative evaluation of the…
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…
Real-life bacteria often swim in complex fluids, but our understanding of the interactions between bacteria and complex surroundings is still evolving. In this work, rod-like \textit{Bacillus subtilis} swims in a quasi-2D environment with…
Motivated by recent experiments on growing fibroblasts, we examine the development of nematic order in a colony of elongated cells proliferating on a nematic elastomer substrate. After sparse seeding, the cells divide and grow into locally…
Bacterial cellulose biofilms are complex networks of strong interwoven nanofibers that control transport and protect bacterial colonies in the film. Design of diverse applications of bacterial cellulose films also relies on understanding…
The phase-ordering kinetics of a bulk uniaxial nematic liquid crystal is addressed using techniques that have been successfully applied to describe ordering in the O(n) model. The method involves constructing an appropriate mapping between…
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…
The evolutionary success of bacteria lies in their ability to form complex surface-associated communities in diverse biophysical settings. However, it remains poorly understood how compliance of soft surfaces, measured in terms of their…
Active matter exhibits remarkable collective behavior in which flows, continuously generated by active particles, are intertwined with the orientational order of these particles. The relationship remains poorly understood as the activity…
The emergence of long-range spatiotemporal order from intrinsic chaos is a central challenge in far-from-equilibrium physics. In active fluids, such as cytoskeletal networks driving cellular motion, self-generated flows typically produce…
Active nematic fluids confined in narrow channels generate spontaneous flows when the activity is sufficiently intense. Recently, it was shown that if the molecular anchoring at the channel walls is conflicting flows are initiated even in…
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 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…