Universality in Bacterial Colonies

Abstract

The emergent spatial patterns generated by growing bacterial colonies have been the focus of intense study in physics during the last twenty years. Both experimental and theoretical investigations have made possible a clear qualitative picture of the different structures that such colonies can exhibit, depending on the medium on which they are growing. However, there are relatively few quantitative descriptions of these patterns. In this paper, we use a mechanistically detailed simulation framework to measure the scaling exponents associated with the advancing fronts of bacterial colonies on hard agar substrata, aiming to discern the universality class to which the system belongs. We show that the universal behavior exhibited by the colonies can be much richer than previously reported, and we propose the possibility of up to four different sub-phases within the medium-to-high nutrient concentration regime. We hypothesize that the quenched disorder that characterizes one of these sub-phases is an emergent property of the growth and division of bacteria competing for limited space and nutrients.

12 pages, 5 figures

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Cited by in corpus (14)

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• Shape of the Growing Front of Biofilms
• Common universal behaviors of magnetic domain walls driven by spin-polarized electrical current and magnetic field
• Non-universality of front fluctuations for compact colonies of non-motile bacteria
• Spreading of non-motile bacteria on a hard agar plate: Comparison between agent-based and stochastic simulations
• Linear surface roughness growth and flow smoothening in a three-dimensional biofilm model
• From bulk descriptions to emergent interfaces: connecting the Ginzburg-Landau and elastic line models
• A numerical study of the statistics of roughness parameters for fluctuating interfaces
• Reduced adhesion between cells and substrate confers selective advantage in bacterial colonies
• Depinning in the quenched Kardar-Parisi-Zhang class I: Mappings, simulations and algorithm
• Rough infection fronts in a random medium
• Absorbing State Phase Transition with Clifford Circuits