Theory of periodic swarming of bacteria: application to Proteus mirabilis

Abstract

The periodic swarming of bacteria is one of the simplest examples for pattern formation produced by the self-organized collective behavior of a large number of organisms. In the spectacular colonies of Proteus mirabilis (the most common species exhibiting this type of growth) a series of concentric rings are developed as the bacteria multiply and swarm following a scenario periodically repeating itself. We have developed a theoretical description for this process in order to get a deeper insight into some of the typical processes governing the phenomena in systems of many interacting living units. All of our theoretical results are in excellent quantitative agreement with the complete set of available observations.

11 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Studies of Bacterial Branching Growth using Reaction-Diffusion Models for Colonial Development
• Derivation of the Matalon-Packter law for Liesegang patterns

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Collective motion
• Noise-Induced Transition from Translational to Rotational Motion of Swarms
• Thermodynamics of emergent structure in active matter
• Modeling the Role of the Cell Cycle in Regulating Proteus mirabilis Swarm-Colony Development
• Effective Entropy Production and Thermodynamic Uncertainty Relation of Active Brownian Particles
• Front structure and dynamics in dense colonies of motile bacteria: Role of active turbulence
• On an age and spatially structured population model for Proteus Mirabilis swarm-colony development
• Radial and spiral stream formation in Proteus mirabilis