TY - JOUR
T1 - Bacterial hopping and trapping in porous media
AU - Bhattacharjee, Tapomoy
AU - Datta, Sujit S.
N1 - Funding Information:
It is a pleasure to acknowledge Tommy Angelini for providing microgel polymers; Average Phan and Bob Austin for providing fluorescent E. coli; Jeremy Cho for assistance with the diffusion analysis; and Tommy Angelini, Paulo Arratia, Bob Austin, Denis Bartolo, Alexander Berezhovskii, Roseanne Ford, Henry Fu, Kela Lushi, Stanislav Shvartsman, Salvatore Torquato, Ned Wingreen, and Vasily Zaburdaev for stimulating discussions. This work was supported by start-up funds from Princeton University, the Project X Innovation fund, and a distinguished postdoctoral fellowship from the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University to T.B.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, The Author(s).
PY - 2019/12/1
Y1 - 2019/12/1
N2 - Diverse processes—e.g. bioremediation, biofertilization, and microbial drug delivery—rely on bacterial migration in disordered, three-dimensional (3D) porous media. However, how pore-scale confinement alters bacterial motility is unknown due to the opacity of typical 3D media. As a result, models of migration are limited and often employ ad hoc assumptions. Here we reveal that the paradigm of run-and-tumble motility is dramatically altered in a porous medium. By directly visualizing individual Escherichia coli, we find that the cells are intermittently and transiently trapped as they navigate the pore space, exhibiting diffusive behavior at long time scales. The trapping durations and the lengths of “hops” between traps are broadly distributed, reminiscent of transport in diverse other disordered systems; nevertheless, we show that these quantities can together predict the long-time bacterial translational diffusivity. Our work thus provides a revised picture of bacterial motility in complex media and yields principles for predicting cellular migration.
AB - Diverse processes—e.g. bioremediation, biofertilization, and microbial drug delivery—rely on bacterial migration in disordered, three-dimensional (3D) porous media. However, how pore-scale confinement alters bacterial motility is unknown due to the opacity of typical 3D media. As a result, models of migration are limited and often employ ad hoc assumptions. Here we reveal that the paradigm of run-and-tumble motility is dramatically altered in a porous medium. By directly visualizing individual Escherichia coli, we find that the cells are intermittently and transiently trapped as they navigate the pore space, exhibiting diffusive behavior at long time scales. The trapping durations and the lengths of “hops” between traps are broadly distributed, reminiscent of transport in diverse other disordered systems; nevertheless, we show that these quantities can together predict the long-time bacterial translational diffusivity. Our work thus provides a revised picture of bacterial motility in complex media and yields principles for predicting cellular migration.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41467-019-10115-1
DO - 10.1038/s41467-019-10115-1
M3 - Article
C2 - 31061418
AN - SCOPUS:85065316864
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 10
JO - Nature Communications
JF - Nature Communications
IS - 1
M1 - 2075
ER -