Shape of the Growing Front of Biofilms

Abstract

The spatial organization of bacteria in dense biofilms is key to their collective behaviour, and understanding it will be important for medical and technological applications. Here we study the morphology of a compact biofilm that undergoes unidirectional growth, and determine the condition for the stability of the growing interface as a function of the nutrient concentration and mechanical tension. Our study suggests that transient behaviour may play an important role in shaping the structure of a biofilm.

13 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Growth and Division of Active Droplets: A Model for Protocells
• Collective force generation by groups of migrating bacteria
• Universality in Bacterial Colonies
• Multicellular self-organization of P. aeruginosa due to interactions with secreted trails

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Cellular Sensing Governs the Stability of Chemotactic Fronts
• Nonequilibrium polarity-induced mechanism for chemotaxis: emergent Galilean symmetry and exact scaling exponents
• Hydraulic and electric control of cell spheroids
• Fingering Instability of Active Nematic Droplets
• Width scaling of an interface constrained by a membrane