How a Biofilm’s Strange Shape Emerges From Cellular Geometry | Quanta Magazine

MBL Research Scientist Scott Chimileski contributed a beautiful video of a biofilm growing to this feature article.

Micro decisions can have macro consequences. A soft matter physicist reveals how interactions within simple cellular collectives can lead to emergent physical traits.

Biofilms lead lives of liminality. Just a few cells thick, these layered communities of microbes anchor themselves to solid surfaces at interfaces — where rocks meet salt water in tide pools, between plants and dirt in root systems, or on the saliva-covered surface of your teeth. Amalgamations of single cells, biofilms grow and develop into unified life forms that can split back into their component cells under duress. Biofilms, then, are somehow both unicellular and multicellular — and simultaneously neither.

Biofilms have emergent properties: traits that appear only when a system of individual items interacts. It was this emergence that attracted the biophysicist Peter Yunker to the microbial structures. Trained in soft matter physics — the study of materials that can be structurally altered — he is interested in understanding how the interactions between individual bacteria result in the higher-order structure of a biofilm.

As cells divide and a biofilm grows, it doesn’t simply expand outward. What starts as a flat, smooth layer of cells stretches and pulses. Strange, sticky shapes appear as the bacteria reassemble into ridges and depressions that warp and buckle, almost as if the collective is breathing. Read rest of the article here.

Source: How a Biofilm’s Strange Shape Emerges From Cellular Geometry | Quanta Magazine