ArticleNature communications2019
Emergence of active nematics in chaining bacterial biofilms.
Article in Nature communications, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers.
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Who cites it
40 citing papers in PubMed.
- Boundary geometry controls a topological defect transition that determines lumen nucleation in embryonic development.Nature materials · 2026Article
- Vector nematodynamics with symmetry-driven energy exchange.The European physical journal. E, Soft matter · 2026Article
- Nematic cell alignment directs calcium waves in an epithelial monolayer.Biophysical journal · 2026Article
- Lifestyle-dependent evolution and CtrA-mediated lifestyle transitions shape phage resistance in marine Roseobacter.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Coupling of colloidal rods to the dynamic order of active nematic films.Soft matter · 2026Article
- From Polar Clusters to Active Nematics: Experimental Signatures of Swarming Dynamics in Bacterial Monolayers.Materials (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Nematic cell alignment directs calcium waves.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Self-propulsive active nematics.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2025Article
- E. coli filament buckling modulates Min patterning and cell division.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Synergistic action of specialized metabolites from divergent biosynthesis in the human oral microbiome.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Dissecting the physics of bacterial biofilms with agent-based simulations.Current opinion in solid state & materials science · 2025Article
- Segmentation of dense and multi-species bacterial colonies using models trained on synthetic microscopy images.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Morphogenesis of bacterial cables in polymeric environments.Science advances · 2025Article
- Growing bacterial colonies harness emergent genealogical demixing to regulate organizational entropy.Biophysical reports · 2024Article
- Curvature-directed anchoring and defect structure of colloidal smectic liquid crystals in confinement.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Quantifying the fractal complexity of nutrient transport channels inMicrobiology (Reading, England) · 2024Article
- The biophysical basis of bacterial colony growth.Nature physics · 2024Article
- Topological defects in multi-layered swarming bacteria.Soft matter · 2024Article
- Agent-based modeling of stress anisotropy driven nematic ordering in growing biofilms.Soft matter · 2024Article
- Topology-guided polar ordering of collective cell migration.Science advances · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Growing tissue and bacterial colonies are active matter systems where cell divisions and cellular motion generate active stress. Although they operate in the non-equilibrium regime, these biological systems can form large-scale ordered structures. How mechanical instabilities drive the dynamics of active matter systems and form ordered structures are not well understood. Here, we use chaining Bacillus subtilis, also known as a biofilm, to study the relation between mechanical instabilities and nematic ordering. We find that bacterial biofilms have intrinsic length scales above which a series of mechanical instabilities occur. Localized stress and friction drive buckling and edge instabilities which further create nematically aligned structures and topological defects. We also observe that topological defects control stress distribution and initiate the formation of sporulation sites by creating three-dimensional structures. In this study we propose an alternative active matter platform to study the essential roles of mechanics in growing biological tissue.
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