Uniform modeling of bacterial colony patterns with varying nutrient and substrate

Deborah Schwarcz, Herbert Levine, Eshel Ben-Jacob, Gil Ariel

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

Bacteria develop complex patterns depending on growth condition. For example, Bacillus subtilis exhibit five different patterns depending on substrate hardness and nutrient concentration. We present a unified integro-differential model that reproduces the entire experimentally observed morphology diagram at varying nutrient concentrations and substrate hardness. The model allows a comprehensive and quantitative comparison between experimental and numerical variables and parameters, such as colony growth rate, nutrient concentration and diffusion constants. As a result, the role of the different physical mechanisms underlying and regulating the growth of the colony can be evaluated.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)91-99
Number of pages9
JournalPhysica D: Nonlinear Phenomena
Volume318-319
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Apr 2016

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Funding

We thank Ismael Rafols for sharing experimental results and electronic copies of Figs. 1 (A) and 4 (A). This article has been supported in part by the NSF Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (Grant Nos. PHY-1427654 and NSF-MCB-1214457 ) at Rice University and by the Tauber Family Funds and the Maguy-Glass Chair in Physics of Complex Systems at Tel Aviv University.

FundersFunder number
National Science Foundation1241332, 1427654
Rice University
Center for Theoretical Biological PhysicsPHY-1427654, NSF-MCB-1214457
Tel Aviv University

    Keywords

    • Bacterial colonies
    • Pattern formation
    • Random lattice
    • Reaction-diffusion model

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