TY - JOUR
T1 - Confinement and activity regulate bacterial motion in porous media
AU - Bhattacharjee, Tapomoy
AU - Datta, Sujit S.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 The Royal Society of Chemistry.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - Understanding how bacteria move in porous media is critical to applications in healthcare, agriculture, environmental remediation, and chemical sensing. Recent work has demonstrated that E. coli, which moves by run-and-tumble dynamics in a homogeneous medium, exhibits a new form of motility when confined in a disordered porous medium: hopping-and-trapping motility, in which cells perform rapid, directed hops punctuated by intervals of slow, undirected trapping. Here, we use direct visualization to shed light on how these processes depend on pore-scale confinement and cellular activity. We find that hopping is determined by pore-scale confinement, and is independent of cellular activity; by contrast, trapping is determined by the competition between pore-scale confinement and cellular activity, as predicted by an entropic trapping model. These results thus help to elucidate the factors that regulate bacterial motion in porous media, and could help aid the development of new models of motility in heterogeneous environments.
AB - Understanding how bacteria move in porous media is critical to applications in healthcare, agriculture, environmental remediation, and chemical sensing. Recent work has demonstrated that E. coli, which moves by run-and-tumble dynamics in a homogeneous medium, exhibits a new form of motility when confined in a disordered porous medium: hopping-and-trapping motility, in which cells perform rapid, directed hops punctuated by intervals of slow, undirected trapping. Here, we use direct visualization to shed light on how these processes depend on pore-scale confinement and cellular activity. We find that hopping is determined by pore-scale confinement, and is independent of cellular activity; by contrast, trapping is determined by the competition between pore-scale confinement and cellular activity, as predicted by an entropic trapping model. These results thus help to elucidate the factors that regulate bacterial motion in porous media, and could help aid the development of new models of motility in heterogeneous environments.
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U2 - 10.1039/c9sm01735f
DO - 10.1039/c9sm01735f
M3 - Article
C2 - 31750508
AN - SCOPUS:85076383968
SN - 1744-683X
VL - 15
SP - 9920
EP - 9930
JO - Soft matter
JF - Soft matter
IS - 48
ER -