Fluid dynamics and noise in bacterial cell–cell and cell–surface scattering

By K. Drescher, Jörn Dunkel, Luis H. Cisneros, Sujoy Ganguly, Raymond E. Goldstein. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2011

724 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Bacterial processes ranging from gene expression to motility and biofilm formation are constantly challenged by internal and external noise. While the importance of stochastic fluctuations has been appreciated for chemotaxis, it is currently believed that deterministic long-range fluid dynamical effects govern cell–cell and cell–surface scattering—the elementary events that lead to swarming and collective swimming in active suspensions and to the formation of biofilms. Here, we report direct measurements of the bacterial flow field generated by individual swimming Escherichia coli both far from and near to a solid surface. These experiments allowed us to examine the relative importance of fluid dynamics and rotational diffusion for bacteria. For cell–cell interactions it is shown that thermal and intrinsic stochasticity drown the effects of long-range fluid dynamics, implying that physical interactions between bacteria are determined by steric collisions and near-field lubrication forces. This dominance of short-range forces closely links collective motion in bacterial suspensions to self-organization in driven granular systems, assemblages of biofilaments, and animal flocks. For the scattering of bacteria with surfaces, long-range fluid dynamical interactions are also shown to be negligible before collisions; however, once the bacterium swims along the surface within a few microns after an aligning collision, hydrodynamic effects can contribute to the experimentally observed, long residence times. Because these results are based on purely mechanical properties, they apply to a wide range of microorganisms.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e53963d78a3e40853eaf6168391fe09a83089ea8

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Citations in the corpus

Tuned, driven, and active soft matter (2015, background): “cell-cell interactions and cell-surface interactions are dominated by orientational diffusion, steric interactions, and lubrication forces, and that hydrodynamic interactions play a minor role [371].”
Active suspensions and their nonlinear models (2013, background): “In the case of biological swimmers, thermal fluctuations are typically too weak to result in significant Brownian motion, but intrinsic diffusion may still arise as a result of imperfections in the shape or swimming actuation of the particles [34,57]; in addition, particle– particle hydrodynamic int”
Active Turbulence (2021, background): “For example, bacteria in dense suspensions are thought to interact mainly by steric repulsion and other short-range interactions such as lubrication forces [37, 38].”
Microswimming in viscoelastic fluids (2021, background): “This phenomenon results from a combination of multiple effects, including far-field hydrodynamic interactions [192], bacteria reorientation due to collisions [194] or Brownian fluctuations [193,195], and surface-induced suppression of flagellar unbundling [196].”
Bacterial hydrodynamics (2015, background): “Although simple models all predict bacteria eventually touching walls and therefore require short-range repulsion (Dunstan et al., 2012; Spagnolie & Lauga, 2012), boundary element computations with a model polar bacterium demonstrated that hydrodynamics alone was able to select a stable orbit with…”
Hydrodynamics of self-propulsion near a boundary: predictions and accuracy of far-field approximations (2012, background): “The strengths of these singularities have been measured experimentally for the organisms Volvox carteri and Chlamydomonas reinhardtii by Drescher et al. (2010), and for E. coli by Drescher et al. (2011).”
Fluid flows created by swimming bacteria drive self-organization in confined suspensions (2014, background): “[24] Drescher K, Dunkel J, Cisneros LH, Ganguly S, Goldstein RE (2011) Fluid dynamics and noise in bacterial cell-cell and cell-surface scattering.”
Physics of microswimmers—single particle motion and collective behavior: a review (2014, background): “A similar conclusion was reached by Drescher et al. (2011), who considered cell-cell scattering.”