Stripe Formation in Bacterial Systems with Density-Suppressed Motility

Xiongfei Fu, Lei-Han Tang, Chenli Liu, Jian-Dong Huang, Terence Hwa, and Peter Lenz

Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 198102 – Published 8 May 2012

Abstract

Engineered bacteria in which motility is reduced by local cell density generate periodic stripes of high and low density when spotted on agar plates. We study theoretically the origin and mechanism of this process in a kinetic model that includes growth and density-suppressed motility of the cells. The spreading of a region of immotile cells into an initially cell-free region is analyzed. From the calculated front profile we provide an analytic ansatz to determine the phase boundary between the stripe and the no-stripe phases. The influence of various parameters on the phase boundary is discussed.

Received 9 September 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.198102

Authors & Affiliations

Xiongfei Fu¹, Lei-Han Tang^2,3, Chenli Liu⁴, Jian-Dong Huang⁴, Terence Hwa⁵, and Peter Lenz⁶

¹Department of Physics, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong, China
²Department of Physics, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China
³Beijing Computational Science Research Center, 3 Heqing Road, Haidian, Beijing 100084, China
⁴Department of Biochemistry, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong, China
⁵Center for Theoretical Biological Physics and Department of Physics, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093-0374, USA
⁶Department of Physics and Center for Synthetic Microbiology, University of Marburg, Marburg, Germany