Fluid flows created by swimming bacteria drive self-organization in confined suspensions

By Enkeleida Lushi, H. Wioland, Raymond E. Goldstein. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014

353 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Significance The collective dynamics of swimming microorganisms exhibits a complex interplay with the surrounding fluid: the motile cells stir the fluid, which in turn can reorient and advect them. This feedback loop can result in long-range interactions between the cells, an effect whose significance remains controversial. We present a computational model that takes into account these cell–fluid interactions and cell–cell forces and that predicts counterintuitive cellular order driven by long-range flows. This prediction is confirmed with experimental studies that track the orientation of cells in a confined, dense bacterial suspension. Concentrated suspensions of swimming microorganisms and other forms of active matter are known to display complex, self-organized spatiotemporal patterns on scales that are large compared with those of the individual motile units. Despite intensive experimental and theoretical study, it has remained unclear the extent to which the hydrodynamic flows generated by swimming cells, rather than purely steric interactions between them, drive the self-organization. Here we use the recent discovery of a spiral-vortex state in confined suspensions of Bacillus subtilis to study this issue in detail. Those experiments showed that if the radius of confinement in a thin cylindrical chamber is below a critical value, the suspension will spontaneously form a steady single-vortex state encircled by a counter-rotating cell boundary layer, with spiral cell orientation within the vortex. Left unclear, however, was the flagellar orientation, and hence the cell swimming direction, within the spiral vortex. Here, using a fast simulation method that captures oriented cell–cell and cell–fluid interactions in a minimal model of discrete particle systems, we predict the striking, counterintuitive result that in the presence of collectively generated fluid motion, the cells within the spiral vortex actually swim upstream against those flows. This prediction is then confirmed by the experiments reported here, which include measurements of flagella bundle orientation and cell tracking in the self-organized state. These results highlight the complex interplay between cell orientation and hydrodynamic flows in concentrated suspensions of microorganisms.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1222f764c2975b7d74aee25540aa2c91d6ac9c38

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In Biomedical Engineering

In Condensed Matter Physics

Citations in the corpus

Topological active matter (2020, background): “Spiral vortices were first stabilized in bacterial suspensions by confinement 122,123 , although their size was limited ( ≲ 80–100 μm) by their intrinsic instability towards turbulence.”
Tuned, driven, and active soft matter (2015, background): “In that sense, hydrodynamic interactions can destroy long-ranged orientationally ordered collective motion, but also more localized orientational order in swarms [541].”
Active Particles in Complex and Crowded Environments (2016, background): “These behaviors have been experimentally observed for both swimming bacteria (Lushi et al., 2014; Wioland et al., 2013) and colloidal rollers (Bricard et al.”