TY - JOUR
T1 - Universality in Bacterial Colonies
AU - Bonachela, Juan A.
AU - Nadell, Carey D.
AU - Xavier, João B.
AU - Levin, Simon Asher
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements We would like to thank M.A. Muñoz, for helpful discussions and suggestions. We gratefully acknowledge support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under grants HR0011-05-1-0057 and HR0011-09-1-055. C.D.N. is supported by a Princeton University Centennial Fellowship and an NSF graduate research fellowship.
PY - 2011/7
Y1 - 2011/7
N2 - The emergent spatial patterns generated by growing bacterial colonies have been the focus of intense study in physics during the last twenty years. Both experimental and theoretical investigations have made possible a clear qualitative picture of the different structures that such colonies can exhibit, depending on the medium on which they are growing. However, there are relatively few quantitative descriptions of these patterns. In this paper, we use a mechanistically detailed simulation framework to measure the scaling exponents associated with the advancing fronts of bacterial colonies on hard agar substrata, aiming to discern the universality class to which the system belongs. We show that the universal behavior exhibited by the colonies can be much richer than previously reported, and we propose the possibility of up to four different sub-phases within the medium-to-high nutrient concentration regime. We hypothesize that the quenched disorder that characterizes one of these sub-phases is an emergent property of the growth and division of bacteria competing for limited space and nutrients.
AB - The emergent spatial patterns generated by growing bacterial colonies have been the focus of intense study in physics during the last twenty years. Both experimental and theoretical investigations have made possible a clear qualitative picture of the different structures that such colonies can exhibit, depending on the medium on which they are growing. However, there are relatively few quantitative descriptions of these patterns. In this paper, we use a mechanistically detailed simulation framework to measure the scaling exponents associated with the advancing fronts of bacterial colonies on hard agar substrata, aiming to discern the universality class to which the system belongs. We show that the universal behavior exhibited by the colonies can be much richer than previously reported, and we propose the possibility of up to four different sub-phases within the medium-to-high nutrient concentration regime. We hypothesize that the quenched disorder that characterizes one of these sub-phases is an emergent property of the growth and division of bacteria competing for limited space and nutrients.
KW - Computational biology
KW - Interfaces in random media (Theory)
KW - Self-affine roughness (Theory)
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U2 - 10.1007/s10955-011-0179-x
DO - 10.1007/s10955-011-0179-x
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:79961007753
SN - 0022-4715
VL - 144
SP - 303
EP - 315
JO - Journal of Statistical Physics
JF - Journal of Statistical Physics
IS - 2
ER -