Abstract
Individual swimming bacteria are known to bias their random trajectories in search of food and to optimize survival. The motion of bacteria within a swarm, wherein they migrate as a collective group over a solid surface, is fundamentally different as typical bacterial swarms show large-scale swirling and streaming motions involving millions to billions of cells. Here by tracking trajectories of fluorescently labelled individuals within such dense swarms, we find that the bacteria are performing super-diffusion, consistent with Lévy walks. Lévy walks are characterized by trajectories that have straight stretches for extended lengths whose variance is infinite. The evidence of super-diffusion consistent with Lévy walks in bacteria suggests that this strategy may have evolved considerably earlier than previously thought.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Article number | 8396 |
Journal | Nature Communications |
Volume | 6 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 25 Sep 2015 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.
Funding
We thank E. Barkai for valuable discussions, ideas, suggestions and informal meetings. We thank D.B. Kearns for the generous gift of B. subtilis and for many useful discussions. We thank A. Eldar and S. Pollak for creating the RFP mutants. We thank D. Roth for ideas and comments. R.M.H is thankful for partial support from the National Institutes of Health Grant GM112507, and the Robert Welch Foundation Grant F-1811. A.B. is thankful for partial support from an EU/FP7 REA grant 321777, The Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 337/12), and the Roy J. Zuckerberg Career Development Chair for Water Research. We are grateful to two anonymous referees for numerous ideas, comments and corrections that considerably improved the paper. The paper is dedicated to the memory of our mentor, colleague and friend Eshel Ben-Jacob.
Funders | Funder number |
---|---|
EU/FP7 REA | 321777 |
National Institutes of Health | |
National Institute of General Medical Sciences | R01GM112507 |
Welch Foundation | F-1811 |
Israel Science Foundation | 337/12 |