ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Morphological instability and roughening of growing 3D bacterial colonies.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed, 97 citations in OpenAlex.
- Granular Hydrogel Composites as Matrices for Engineered Living Materials.ACS applied polymer materials · 2026Article
- Morphogenesis of bacterial colonies in liquid crystalline environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Physical encounters impose a consistency-amount trade-off on bacterial group formation in marine environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Sorption-mediated organohalide respiration biokinetics of tetrachloroethene.Water research · 2026Article
- Geometric ordering in bacterial communities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Ecosystem technology (ecotech): Harnessing natural processes to address global challenges.Science advances · 2026Review
- Minding the gap: collective determinants of multiscale structure across interacting bacterial colonies.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Transition from traveling fronts to diffusion-limited growth in expanding populations.Physical review. E · 2026Article
- A nutrient bottleneck controls antibiotic efficacy in structured bacterial populations.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Article
- Article
- Biophysics of Bacterial Colonial Structures and the Occupancy of Microecological Spaces.Biology · 2025Review
- Understanding the development of bacterial colony: Physiology, new technology, and modeling.Quantitative biology (Beijing, China) · 2025Review
- Spatial self-organization of confined bacterial suspensions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- A multicellular self-organized probiotic platform for oral delivery enhances intestinal colonization.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Microfluidics unveils role of gravity and shear stress on Pseudomonas fluorescens motility and biofilm growth.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2025Article
- Dissecting the physics of bacterial biofilms with agent-based simulations.Current opinion in solid state & materials science · 2025Article
- Metabolically driven flows enable exponential growth in macroscopic multicellular yeast.Science advances · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
How do growing bacterial colonies get their shapes? While colony morphogenesis is well studied in two dimensions, many bacteria grow as large colonies in three-dimensional (3D) environments, such as gels and tissues in the body or subsurface soils and sediments. Here, we describe the morphodynamics of large colonies of bacteria growing in three dimensions. Using experiments in transparent 3D granular hydrogel matrices, we show that dense colonies of four different species of bacteria generically become morphologically unstable and roughen as they consume nutrients and grow beyond a critical size-eventually adopting a characteristic branched, broccoli-like morphology independent of variations in the cell type and environmental conditions. This behavior reflects a key difference between two-dimensional (2D) and 3D colonies; while a 2D colony may access the nutrients needed for growth from the third dimension, a 3D colony inevitably becomes nutrient limited in its interior, driving a transition to unstable growth at its surface. We elucidate the onset of the instability using linear stability analysis and numerical simulations of a continuum model that treats the colony as an "active fluid" whose dynamics are driven by nutrient-dependent cellular growth. We find that when all dimensions of the colony substantially exceed the nutrient penetration length, nutrient-limited growth drives a 3D morphological instability that recapitulates essential features of the experimental observations. Our work thus provides a framework to predict and control the organization of growing colonies-as well as other forms of growing active matter, such as tumors and engineered living materials-in 3D environments.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.