Competitive bacterial swarming model

D. HANSMANN; G. FIER; R. C. BUCETA

Bahía Blanca

Congreso; TREFEMAC 2014 - 12° Congreso Regional de Física Estadística y Aplicaciones a la Materia Condensada; 2014

IFISUR (CONICET-UNS)

Bacterial colonies show complex patterns of movement which have been classified during the last years as swimming, swarming, gliding, twitching ect. Here collective behavior of a bacterial colony depends strongly on both, the bacterial species and the medium they are moving in. In the present work we focus on a movement pattern known as swarming. Swarming is observed in some bacterial species like Escherichia coli, which inoculated on proper agar mediums elongate their cells, raise their number of flagella, multinucleate and spread rapidly outward in a thin, highly motile layer [1]. The main difference between swimming and swarming is that in the latter one the bacteria cannot absorb into the agar and must move above the surface becoming. Hence, swarming is a classical two dimensional phenomena. Recent studies identified different regions within the swarming colonies which show different cell densities, cell velocities and areas [2]. In this work we present a model which intents to reproduce the basic dynamics and heterogeneous regions of a swarming colony by a ridged body agent-model using simple rules of movement. REFERENCES: 1- Collective motion, T Vicsek & A Zafeiris, Phys. Rep. 517 (2012) 71-140; 2- Dynamics of Bacterial Swarming, NC Darnton, L Turner, S Rojevsky & HC Berg, Biophys. J. 98 (2012) 2082-2090.