Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS March Meeting 2023
Volume 68, Number 3
Las Vegas, Nevada (March 5-10)
Virtual (March 20-22); Time Zone: Pacific Time
Session N11: Biological Active Matter IV
11:30 AM–2:18 PM,
Wednesday, March 8, 2023
Room: Room 203
Sponsoring
Unit:
DBIO
Chair: Suraj Shankar, Harvard University
Abstract: N11.00010 : Chiral Symmetry Breaking and Vortical States in Bacterial Biofilm*
1:42 PM–1:54 PM
Presenter:
Livio Nicola Carenza
(Leiden University - Lorentz Institute)
Authors:
Livio Nicola Carenza
(Leiden University - Lorentz Institute)
Mustafa Basaran
(Harvard University)
Tevfik Can Yüce
(Koc University - College of Science)
Luca Giomi
(Leiden University)
Askin Kocabas
(Koc University - College of Science)
But how do biofilms regulate their growth and self-assemble into large-scale dynamical structures? And how can we control them?
In this work we make use of experimental, theoretical and computational techniques to investigate the transition between the swarming and biofilm regime in a system of genetically modified Bacillus subtilis. These mutations lead to longer, highly flagellate bacteria with low tumbling rates. First, we observe that these features result into the formation of large motile clusters of bacteria which can either develop translational or rotational motion according to the internal bacterial organization. Even more importantly, we observe these dynamical states to be chirally biased and systematically rotate in the clockwise direction.
We rationalize these findings through the active gel theory, by observing that the localized coupling between bacterial dynamics and the no-slip substrate results into an effective perturbative torque, which breaks chiral symmetry and ultimately acts as a selection mechanism between two -otherwise equivalent- rotational states.
*This work is supported by the European Union via the ERC-CoGgrant HexaTissue and by Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO/OCW) as part of the research program Science-XL 2019.022. The computational work was carried out on the Dutch national e-infrastructure with the support of SURF through the NWO Grant 2021.028 for computational time.
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