Formation and Dissolution of Bacterial Colonies

Abstract

Many organisms form colonies for a transient period of time to withstand environmental pressure. Bacterial biofilms are a prototypical example of such behavior. Despite significant interest across disciplines, physical mechanisms governing the formation and dissolution of bacterial colonies are still poorly understood. Starting from a kinetic description of motile and interacting cells we derive a hydrodynamic equation for their density on a surface. We use it to describe formation of multiple colonies with sizes consistent with experimental data and to discuss their dissolution.

3 figures, 1 Supplementary Material

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Cited by in corpus (6)

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• How bacterial cells and colonies move on solid substrates
• Clustering of bacteria with heterogeneous motility
• On continuum modeling of cell aggregation phenomena
• Fluctuating Hydrodynamics Describes Transport in Cellular Aggregates
• Density-dependent transport coefficients in two-dimensional cellular aggregates