ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2017
Mechanical interactions in bacterial colonies and the surfing probability of beneficial mutations.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed, 83 citations in OpenAlex.
- Biosurfactants direct the evolutionary dynamics of surface-associated microbial systems.Science advances · 2026Article
- Morphogenesis of bacterial colonies in liquid crystalline environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Age-structured mechanical models for tumor growth.Journal of mathematical biology · 2026Article
- Understanding the development of bacterial colony: Physiology, new technology, and modeling.Quantitative biology (Beijing, China) · 2025Review
- Effects of curvature on growing films of microorganisms.Biophysical journal · 2025Article
- Disentangling the feedback loops driving spatial patterning in microbial communities.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2025Review
- Morphogenesis of bacterial cables in polymeric environments.Science advances · 2025Article
- Growing bacterial colonies harness emergent genealogical demixing to regulate organizational entropy.Biophysical reports · 2024Article
- The biophysical basis of bacterial colony growth.Nature physics · 2024Article
- Substrate geometry affects population dynamics in a bacterial biofilm.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Quantifying stochastic establishment of mutants in microbial adaptation.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2023Review
- Impact of crowding on the diversity of expanding populations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Mutant-Dependent Local Orientational Correlation in Biofilms ofInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2023Article
- Spatial scales of competition and a growth-motility trade-off interact to determine bacterial coexistence.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Morphological instability and roughening of growing 3D bacterial colonies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Shared biophysical mechanisms determine early biofilm architecture development across different bacterial species.PLoS biology · 2022Article
- Growth instabilities shape morphology and genetic diversity of microbial colonies.Physical biology · 2022Article
- Stochastic establishment of β-lactam-resistantProceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Article
- Lineage dynamics in growing biofilms: Spatial patterns of standing vs.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Bacterial conglomerates such as biofilms and microcolonies are ubiquitous in nature and play an important role in industry and medicine. In contrast to well-mixed cultures routinely used in microbial research, bacteria in a microcolony interact mechanically with one another and with the substrate to which they are attached. Here, we use a computer model of a microbial colony of rod-shaped cells to investigate how physical interactions between cells determine their motion in the colony and how this affects biological evolution. We show that the probability that a faster-growing mutant 'surfs' at the colony's frontier and creates a macroscopic sector depends on physical properties of cells (shape, elasticity and friction). Although all these factors contribute to the surfing probability in seemingly different ways, their effects can be summarized by two summary statistics that characterize the front roughness and cell alignment. Our predictions are confirmed by experiments in which we measure the surfing probability for colonies of different front roughness. Our results show that physical interactions between bacterial cells play an important role in biological evolution of new traits, and suggest that these interactions may be relevant to processes such as
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.