Regensburg 2022 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 12: Poster 2

BP 12.61: Poster

Tuesday, September 6, 2022, 17:30–19:30, P4

Physical heterogeneities in bacterial mixtures under flow — •Giacomo Di Dio, Victor Sourjik, and Remy Colin — Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, Marburg, Germany

Bacteria are often found in heterogeneous communities organized thorough physical interaction with their surrounding environment. Although external physical constraints like shear flow are frequent in natural situations, little is still known about their effect on the distribution of bacteria within complex communities. Under no flow condition, previous experiments have shown the emergence of large density fluctuations of passive bacterial cells driven by the activity of motile bacteria with which they are mixed. Through microfluidic experiments, we investigate how the spatiotemporal organization and the density distribution of a binary mixture of active and passive E. coli bacteria react under different configurations of shear flow. Our initial focus is on the effect of Poiseuille flow (linear shear profile) on the mixture, but we also plan to study the behavior under Couette flow. We notably focus on possible transport effects emerging from the combined action of external shear and active swimming on the non-motile species of the mixture. Our experiments aim at understanding the physical roles of flow and shear in the spatiotemporal organization of multispecies bacterial communities