Abstract
To add to the current state of knowledge about bacterial swimming dynamics, in this paper, we study the fractal swimming dynamics of populations of Serratia marcescens bacteria both in vitro and in silico, while accounting for realistic conditions like volume exclusion, chemical interactions, obstacles and distribution of chemoattractant in the environment. While previous research has shown that bacterial motion is non-ergodic, we demonstrate that, besides the non-ergodicity, the bacterial swimming dynamics is multi-fractal in nature. Finally, we demonstrate that the multi-fractal characteristic of bacterial dynamics is strongly affected by bacterial density and chemoattractant concentration.
Highlights
The future potential of using bacteria for therapeutic purposes [1,2] and regenerative medicine makes the dynamics of such microswimmers highly attractive to study
To add to the current knowledge, in this paper, we take into account realistic conditions like volume exclusion, chemical interactions among bacteria, obstacles and heterogeneous distribution of chemoattractant in the environment and identify fractal characteristics of single bacterium motion, which could have a fundamental impact on mathematical modelling of both single bacterium and population swimming dynamics
To elucidate the complexity of the bacterial dynamics, we investigate the individual trajectories of simulated S. marcescens beside trajectories of real S. marcescens at multiple scales in space and time; this way, we show single bacterium motion has a phase transition from a superdiffusive behaviour to a normal diffusion and lastly to a sub-diffusive pattern based on bacterial density and chemoattractant distribution
Summary
The future potential of using bacteria for therapeutic purposes [1,2] and regenerative medicine makes the dynamics of such microswimmers highly attractive to study. To analyse the effect of obstacles on bacterial motion, we considered 0.01% of the small cubes uniformly distributed in the environment to be impenetrable (i.e. totally 104 number of cubes are impenetrable); when the bacterium hits one of these cubes, it cannot continue to enter the cube and it will continue tumbling to choose a new direction for its run (Note 8 in electronic supplementary material explains how the obstacles have been applied to BNSim in more detail). It is important to investigate the effects of obstacles and bacterial density on single bacterium motion separately based on the differences in the nature of their effects In this case, we had the same set-up for environment and simulated bacteria as for case 1. We simulated each bacterial density considering two different conditions: with the gradient of chemoattractant in the environment and without the gradient of chemoattractant in the environment
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