[en] Spatiotemporal organization of individuals within growing bacterial colonies is a key determinant of intraspecific interactions and colony-scale heterogeneities. The evolving cellular distribution, in relation to the genealogical lineage, is thus central to our understanding of bacterial fate across scales. Yet, how bacteria self-organize genealogically as a colony expands has remained unknown. Here, by developing a custom-built label-free algorithm, we track and study the genesis and evolution of emergent self-similar genealogical enclaves, whose dynamics are governed by biological activity. Topological defects at enclave boundaries tune finger-like morphologies of the active interfaces. The Shannon entropy of cell arrangements reduce over time; with faster-dividing cells possessing higher spatial affinity to genealogical relatives, at the cost of a well-mixed, entropically favorable state. Our coarse-grained lattice model demonstrates that genealogical enclaves emerge due to an interplay of division-mediated dispersal, stochasticity of division events, and cell-cell interactions. The study reports so-far hidden emergent self-organizing features arising due to entropic suppression, ultimately modulating intraspecific genealogical distances within bacterial colonies.
Disciplines :
Physical, chemical, mathematical & earth Sciences: Multidisciplinary, general & others
Author, co-author :
RANI, Garima ; University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine > Department of Physics and Materials Science > Team Anupam SENGUPTA
FNR11572821 - MBRACE - Biophysics Of Microbial Adaptation To Fluctuations In The Environment, 2017 (15/05/2018-14/11/2024) - Anupam Sengupta FNR13719464 - TOPOFLUME - Topological Fluid Mechanics: Decoding Emergent Dynamics In Anisotropic Fluids And Living Systems, 2019 (01/09/2020-31/08/2023) - Anupam Sengupta
Name of the research project :
R-AGR-3401 - A17/MS/11572821/MBRACE - part UL - SENGUPTA Anupam R-AGR-3692 - C19/MS/13719464/TOPOFLUME - SENGUPTA Anupam U-AGR-8060 - HFSP Postdoctoral Fellowship G. Rani - p - SENGUPTA Anupam U-AGR-6003 - IAS-AUDACITY CAMEOS - SENGUPTA Anupam
Funders :
University of Luxembourg Human Frontier Science Program FNR
Funding text :
We gratefully acknowledge the support from the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Luxembourg (AUDACITY grant: IAS-20/CAMEOS to A.S.) and a Human Frontier Science Program Cross Disciplinary Fellowship ( LT 00230/2021-C to G.R.). We thank J. Nguyen for the raw image displayed in Fig. S6 A. A.S. thanks Luxembourg National Research Fund for the ATTRACT Investigator Grant ( A17/MS/ 11572821/MBRACE ) and a CORE Grant ( C19/MS/13719464/TOPOFLUME/Sengupta ) for supporting this work.
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