Spatiotemporal Self-Organization of Fluctuating Bacterial Colonies

Tobias Grafke, Michael E. Cates, Eric Vanden-Eijnden
2017 Physical Review Letters  
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 re-initiate the cycle. Adding fluctuations, we find that static colonies are now metastable, moving between spatial locations via rare and strongly
more » ... um 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.
doi:10.1103/physrevlett.119.188003 pmid:29219541 fatcat:rg4grsj7qffthk6e3hshdlygke