Regensburg 2019 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 24: Cell adhesion and migration, multicellular systems I
BP 24.4: Talk
Thursday, April 4, 2019, 10:30–10:45, H11
Continuum theory of bacterial aggregates — •Hui-Shun Kuan1, 2, Frank Jülicher2, and Vasily Zaburdaev1, 2 — 1Department of Biology, Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany — 2Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany
Cellular aggregates are common in many biological settings, ranging from bacterial biofilms to organoids and tumors. The dynamics of these systems is intrinsically non-equilibrium and driven by active processes in individual cells. In this work, motivated by Neisseria gonorrhoeae bacteria we develop a continuum theory to study bacterial aggregates driven by attractive pili-mediated forces and with excluded volume interactions. We describe the process of aggregate formation as an active phase separation phenomenon and identify the physics of the coalescence between two aggregates. In addition, within the same framework we can describe the demixing process of two bacterial types differing in the properties of their pili–pili interactions and thus can recover the patterns observed in experiments. Furthermore, this general hydrodynamic approach offers a way to incorporate the viscoelastic nature of the bacterial colonies and provide a link to the experiments focusing on material properties of cellular aggregates.