Flow-Induced Symmetry Breaking in Growing Bacterial Biofilms
Name
PhysRevLett.123.258101.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
713.7 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
162422fe1a7706fd7da043b52c338ab0
Author(s)
Pearce, Philip
Song, Boya
Skinner, Dominic J
Mok, Rachel
Hartmann, Raimo
Singh, Praveen K
Jeckel, Hannah
Oishi, Jeffrey S
Drescher, Knut
Dunkel, Jörn
Date Issued
2019
Journal
Physical Review Letters
Publisher
American Physical Society (APS)
Abstract
© 2019 American Physical Society. Bacterial biofilms represent a major form of microbial life on Earth and serve as a model active nematic system, in which activity results from growth of the rod-shaped bacterial cells. In their natural environments, ranging from human organs to industrial pipelines, biofilms have evolved to grow robustly under significant fluid shear. Despite intense practical and theoretical interest, it is unclear how strong fluid flow alters the local and global architectures of biofilms. Here, we combine highly time-resolved single-cell live imaging with 3D multiscale modeling to investigate the mechanisms by which flow affects the dynamics of all individual cells in growing biofilms. Our experiments and cell-based simulations reveal three quantitatively different growth phases in strong external flow and the transitions between them. In the initial stages of biofilm development, flow induces a downstream gradient in cell orientation, causing asymmetrical dropletlike biofilm shapes. In the later developmental stages, when the majority of cells are sheltered from the flow by the surrounding extracellular matrix, buckling-induced cell verticalization in the biofilm core restores radially symmetric biofilm growth, in agreement with predictions of a 3D continuum model.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mathematics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PHYSREVLETT.123.258101
