English

A hyperbolic-elliptic-parabolic PDE model describing chemotactic E. coli colonies

Analysis of PDEs 2020-11-03 v1

Abstract

We study a modified version of an initial-boundary value problem describing the formation of colony patterns of bacteria \textit{Escherichia Coli}. The original system of three parabolic equations was studied numerically and analytically and gave insights into the underlying mechanisms of chemotaxis. We focus here on the parabolic-elliptic-parabolic approximation and the hyperbolic-elliptic-parabolic limiting system which describes the case of pure chemotactic movement without random diffusion. We first construct local-in-time solutions for the parabolic-elliptic-parabolic system. Then we prove uniform \textit{a priori} estimates and we use them along with a compactness argument in order to construct local-in-time solutions for the hyperbolic-elliptic-parabolic limiting system. Finally, we prove that some initial conditions give rise to solutions which blow-up in finite time in the LL^\infty norm in all space dimensions. This last result violet is true even in space dimension 1, which is not the case for the full parabolic or parabolic-elliptic Keller-Segel systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2011.00651,
  title  = {A hyperbolic-elliptic-parabolic PDE model describing chemotactic E. coli colonies},
  author = {Danielle Hilhorst and Pierre Roux},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.00651},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:49:42.689Z