ArticleeLife2019
A multiphase theory for spreading microbial swarms and films.
Article in eLife, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed.
- What is active wetting?The European physical journal. E, Soft matter · 2026Review
- Geometric ordering in bacterial communities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Swashing: a propulsion-independent form of bacterial surface migration.Journal of bacteriology · 2025Article
- Dynamic fluid layer around immotile yeast colonies mediates the spread of bacteria.Biophysical journal · 2025Article
- Substrate stiffness modulates collective colony expansion of the social bacteriumAPL bioengineering · 2025Article
- Article
- Swashing motility: A novel propulsion-independent mechanism for surface migration inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Fly embryo nuclei riding on two-fluid flow.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Swarming ofBiophysics reviews · 2023Review
- Anomalous diffusion of nanoparticles in the spatially heterogeneous biofilm environment.iScience · 2023Article
- Understanding how bacterial collectives organize on surfaces by tracking surfactant flow.Current opinion in solid state & materials science · 2023Article
- Mechanobiology as a tool for addressing the genotype-to-phenotype problem in microbiology.Biophysics reviews · 2023Review
- Vertical growth dynamics of biofilms.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Density and temperature controlled fluid extraction in a bacterial biofilm is determined by poly-γ-glutamic acid production.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2022Article
- Morphological instability and roughening of growing 3D bacterial colonies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Article
- Biophysical aspects underlying the swarm to biofilm transition.Science advances · 2022Article
- Bacterial motility: machinery and mechanisms.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2022Review
- Spreading rates of bacterial colonies depend on substrate stiffness and permeability.PNAS nexus · 2022Article
- Adaptation ofACS biomaterials science & engineering · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Bacterial swarming and biofilm formation are collective multicellular phenomena through which diverse microbial species colonize and spread over water-permeable tissue. During both modes of surface translocation, fluid uptake and transport play a key role in shaping the overall morphology and spreading dynamics. Here we develop a generalized two-phase thin-film model that couples bacterial growth, extracellular matrix swelling, fluid flow, and nutrient transport to describe the expansion of both highly motile bacterial swarms, and sessile bacterial biofilms. We show that swarm expansion corresponds to steady-state solutions in a nutrient-rich, capillarity dominated regime. In contrast, biofilm colony growth is described by transient solutions associated with a nutrient-limited, extracellular polymer stress driven limit. We apply our unified framework to explain a range of recent experimental observations of steady and unsteady expansion of microbial swarms and biofilms. Our results demonstrate how the physics of flow and transport in slender geometries serve to constrain biological organization in microbial communities.
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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.