TY - JOUR
T1 - Spatiotemporal Self-Organization of Fluctuating Bacterial Colonies
AU - Grafke, Tobias
AU - Cates, Michael E.
AU - Vanden-Eijnden, Eric
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank T. Schäfer for his help with the numerical scheme and A. Donev, O. Hirschberg, and C. Nardini for interesting discussions. M. E. C. is funded by the Royal Society. E. V. E. is supported in part by the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. DMR-1420073, and by NSF under Grant No. DMS-1522767.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 American Physical Society.
PY - 2017/11/3
Y1 - 2017/11/3
N2 - We model an enclosed system of bacteria, whose motility-induced phase separation is coupled to slow population dynamics. Without noise, the system shows both static phase separation and a limit cycle, in which a rising global population causes a dense bacterial colony to form, which then declines by local cell death, before dispersing to reinitiate the cycle. Adding fluctuations, we find that static colonies are now metastable, moving between spatial locations via rare and strongly nonequilibrium pathways, whereas the limit cycle becomes almost periodic such that after each redispersion event the next colony forms in a random location. These results, which hint at some aspects of the biofilm-planktonic life cycle, can be explained by combining tools from large deviation theory with a bifurcation analysis in which the global population density plays the role of control parameter.
AB - We model an enclosed system of bacteria, whose motility-induced phase separation is coupled to slow population dynamics. Without noise, the system shows both static phase separation and a limit cycle, in which a rising global population causes a dense bacterial colony to form, which then declines by local cell death, before dispersing to reinitiate the cycle. Adding fluctuations, we find that static colonies are now metastable, moving between spatial locations via rare and strongly nonequilibrium pathways, whereas the limit cycle becomes almost periodic such that after each redispersion event the next colony forms in a random location. These results, which hint at some aspects of the biofilm-planktonic life cycle, can be explained by combining tools from large deviation theory with a bifurcation analysis in which the global population density plays the role of control parameter.
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U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.188003
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.188003
M3 - Article
C2 - 29219541
AN - SCOPUS:85032787705
SN - 0031-9007
VL - 119
JO - Physical Review Letters
JF - Physical Review Letters
IS - 18
M1 - 188003
ER -