Mechanically-driven spreading of bacterial populations
arXiv:1501.00246 · doi:10.1016/j.cnsns.2015.10.026
Abstract
The effect of mechanical interactions between cells in the spreading of bacterial populations was investigated in one-dimensional space. A continuum-mechanics approach, comprising cell migration, proliferation, and exclusion processes, was employed to elucidate the dynamics. The consequent nonlinear reaction-diffusion-like equation describes the constitution dynamics of a bacterial population. In this model, bacterial cells were treated as rod-like particles that interact with each other through hard-core repulsion, which introduces the exclusion effect that causes bacterial populations to migrate quickly and at high density. The propagation of bacterial density as a traveling wave front over extended times was also analysed. The analytical and numerical solutions revealed that the front speed was enhanced by the exclusion process, which depended upon the cell-packing fraction. Finally, we qualitatively compared our theoretical results with experimental evidence.
16 pages, 3 figures, Accepted for publication in Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation
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