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Register a new userFinite-size effects on bacterial population expansion under controlled fow conditions
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The expansion of biological species in natural environments is usually described as the combined effect of individual spatial dispersal and growth. In the case of aquatic ecosystems flow transport can also be extremely relevant as an extra, advection induced, dispersal factor. There is a lack of reproducible experimental studies on biological fronts of living organisms in controlled streaming habitats. It is thus not clear if, and to which extent, the current theoretical and experimental knowledge on advective-reactive-diffusive fronts for chemical reactions can also apply to the expansion of biological populations. We designed and assembled a dedicated microfluidic device to control and quantify the expansion of populations of $E.coli$ bacteria under both co-flowing and counter-flowing conditions, measuring the front speed at varying intensity of the imposed flow. At variance with respect to the case of autocatalytic reactions, we measure that almost irrespective of the counter-flow velocity, the front speed remains finite at a constant positive value. A simple model incorporating growth, dispersion and drift on finite-size hard beads allows to explain this finding as due to a finite volume effect of the bacteria. This indicates that models based on the Fisher-Kolmogorov-Petrovsky-Piscounov equation (FKPP) that ignore the finite size of organisms may be inaccurate to describe the physics of spatial growth dynamics of bacteria.
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We study critical point finite-size effects in the case of the susceptibility of a film in which interactions are characterized by a van der Waals-type power law tail. The geometry is appropriate to a slab-like system with two bounding surfaces. Boundary conditions are consistent with surfaces that both prefer the same phase in the low temperature, or broken symmetry, state. We take into account both interactions within the system and interactions between the constituents of the system and the material surrounding it. Specific predictions are made with respect to the behavior of a $^3$He and $^4$He films in the vicinity of their respective liquid-vapor critical points.
Thermal light sources can produce photons with strong spatial correlations. We study the role that these correlations might potentially play in bacterial photosynthesis. Our findings show a relationship between the transversal distance between consecutive absorption and the efficiency of the photosynthetic process. Furthermore, membranes where the clustering of core complexes (so-called RC-LH1) is high, display a range where the organism profits maximally from the spatial correlation of the incoming light. By contrast, no maximum is found for membranes with low core-core clustering. We employ a detailed membrane model with state-of-the-art empirical inputs. Our results suggest that the organization of the membranes antenna complexes may be well-suited to the spatial correlations present in an natural light source. Future experiments will be needed to test this prediction.
We study the effects of finite-sizeness on small, neutrally buoyant, spherical particles advected by open chaotic flows. We show that, when projected onto configuration space, the advected finite-size particles disperse about the unstable manifold of the chaotic saddle that governs the passive advection. Using a discrete-time system for the dynamics, we obtain an expression predicting the dispersion of the finite-size particles in terms of their Stokes parameter at the onset of the finite-sizeness induced dispersion. We test our theory in a system derived from a flow and find remarkable agreement between our expression and the numerically measured dispersion.
Inspired by recent experiments on the effects of cytosolic crowders on the organization of bacterial chromosomes, we consider a feather-boa type model chromosome in the presence of non-additive crowders, encapsulated within a cylindrical cell. We observe spontaneous emergence of complementary helicity of the confined polymer and crowders. This feature is reproduced within a simplified effective model of the chromosome. This latter model further establishes the occurrence of longitudinal and transverse spatial segregation transitions between the chromosome and crowders upon increasing crowder size.
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 three-dimensional structure with a vertically-aligned core. Here, we elucidate the physical mechanism underpinning this transition using a combination of agent-based and continuum modeling. We find that verticalization proceeds through a series of localized mechanical instabilities on the cellular scale. For short cells, these instabilities are primarily triggered by cell division, whereas long cells are more likely to be peeled off the surface by nearby vertical cells, creating an inverse domino effect. The interplay between cell growth and cell verticalization gives rise to an exotic mechanical state in which the effective surface pressure becomes constant throughout the growing core of the biofilm surface layer. This dynamical isobaricity determines the expansion speed of a biofilm cluster and thereby governs how cells access the third dimension. In particular, theory predicts that a longer average cell length yields more rapidly expanding, flatter biofilms. We experimentally show that such changes in biofilm development occur by exploiting chemicals that modulate cell length.
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