Bacteria display optimal transport near surfaces -- bacteria as intermittent active chiral particles: trapped by hydrodynamics, escaping by adhesion

Abstract

The near-surface swimming patterns of bacteria are strongly determined by the hydrodynamic interactions between bacteria and the surface, which trap bacteria in smooth circular trajectories that lead to inefficient surface exploration. Here, we show by combining experiments and a data-driven mathematical model that surface exploration of enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) -- a pathogenic strain of E. coli causing serious illnesses such as bloody diarrhea -- results from a complex interplay between motility and transient surface adhesion events. These events allow EHEC to break the smooth circular trajectories and regulate their transport properties by the use stop-adhesion events that lead to a characteristic intermittent motion on surfaces. We find that the experimentally measured frequency of stop-adhesion events in EHEC is located at the value predicted by the developed mathematical model that maximizes bacterial surface diffusivity. We indicate that these results and the developed model apply to other bacterial strains on different surfaces, which suggests that swimming bacteria use transient adhesion to regulate surface motion.

a typo in an intext expression of rates was corrected

References in corpus (10)

• The hydrodynamics of swimming microorganisms
• Physics of Microswimmers - Single Particle Motion and Collective Behavior
• Hydrodynamic attraction of swimming microorganisms by surfaces
• Fluid dynamics and noise in bacterial cell-cell and cell-surface scattering
• Hydrodynamics of self-propulsion near a boundary: predictions and accuracy of far-field approximations
• Diffusive transport without detailed balance in motile bacteria: Does microbiology need statistical physics?
• Collective motion and nonequilibrium cluster formation in colonies of gliding bacteria
• Dynamics of a Brownian circle swimmer
• The Bacterial Chemotactic Response Reflects a Compromise Between Transient and Steady State Behavior
• Signalling noise enhances chemotactic drift of E. coli

Cited by in corpus (9)

• The Parental Active Model: a unifying stochastic description of self-propulsion
• Simultaneous Phase Separation and Pattern Formation in Chiral Active Mixtures
• Optimal navigation strategy of active Brownian particles in target-search problems
• Random motion of a circle microswimmer in a random environment
• A novel approach to chemotaxis: active particles guided by internal clocks
• Optimal run-and-tumble in slit-like confinement
• Geometric phase methods with Stokes theorem for a general viscous swimmer
• Kinetic and macroscopic models for active particles exploring complex environments with an internal navigation control system
• Bayesian inference of Lévy walks via hidden Markov models