Dresden 2017 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 29: Physics of Collective Mobility (Symposium SYCM, joint SOE / DY / BP / jDPG)

DY 29.2: Invited Talk

Wednesday, March 22, 2017, 10:00–10:30, HSZ 02

Trail-following bacteria: from single particle dynamics to collective behaviour — Anatolij Gelimson¹, Kun Zhao^2,3, Calvin K. Lee³, W. Till Kranz¹, Gerard C. L. Wong³, and •Ramin Golestanian¹ — ¹Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3NP, United Kingdom — ²Key Laboratory of Systems Bioengineering, Ministry of Education, School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, People's Republic of China — ³Bioengineering Department, Chemistry & Biochemistry Department, California Nano Systems Institute, UCLA, 90095-1600, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Can we learn from bacteria how to coordinate our mobility, and navigate our way towards mutually beneficial collective states? Trail-following bacteria leave behind precious exopolysaccharides as marker of where they been, and use it to accelerate the formation of colonies. We study this phenomenon, by building a stochastic microscopic model for the pili-driven motility of bacteria that interact with trails which could be laid by themselves and others. We discuss its phenomenology both at the level of single bacterium dynamics and collective self-organization into colonies. We validate the model using Pseudomonas aeruginosa trajectories, and show that fitting the parameters at the single bacterium level leads to a good quantitative agreement between the predictions of the model for the collective behaviour of the colony and the corresponding experimental observations.