SKM 2023 – scientific programme

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CPP: Fachverband Chemische Physik und Polymerphysik

CPP 38: Microswimmers and Fluid Physics of Life (joint session DY/CPP)

CPP 38.3: Talk

Wednesday, March 29, 2023, 15:30–15:45, MOL 213

Bacterial spreading in complex environments — •Agniva Datta, Sönke Beier, Veronika Pfeifer, Robert Großmann, and Carsten Beta — Institute of Physics and Astronomy, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

Elucidating the principles of bacterial motility and navigation is key to understand many important phenomena such as the spreading of infectious diseases and the formation of biofilms. A prime challenge of swimming bacteria is to navigate in their habitat purposefully and efficiently, e.g., in the soil, which is a complex, structured environment. In this talk, we address the question of how bacterial navigation at the microscale relates to their large-scale spreading in heterogeneous environments. We combine experiments with the soil bacterium Pseudomonas putida with active particle modeling. In particular, the motility pattern of these bacteria in agar will be discussed with a focus on anomalous transport properties in disordered environments. In contrast to E. coli, our analysis reveals transient subdiffusion of bacteria in agar due to intermittent trapping, giving rise to a hop-and-trap dynamics with power-law distributed trap times.