Mechanically-driven spreading of bacterial populations

• Main Authors: Waipot Ngamsaad, Suthep Suantai
• Format: Journal
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: Mathematics
• Online Access: https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=84951848821&origin=inward; http://cmuir.cmu.ac.th/jspui/handle/6653943832/55950
• Institution: Chiang Mai University

© 2015 Elsevier B.V. The effect of mechanical interactions between cells in the spreading of bacterial populations was investigated in one-dimensional space. A continuum-mechanics approach, comprising cell migration, proliferation, and exclusion processes, was employed to elucidate the dynamics. The consequent nonlinear reaction-diffusion-like equation describes the constitution dynamics of a bacterial population. In this model, bacterial cells were treated as rod-like particles that interact with each other through hard-core repulsion, which introduces the exclusion effect that causes bacterial populations to migrate quickly at high density. The propagation of bacterial density as a traveling wave front over extended times was also analyzed. The analytical and numerical solutions revealed that the front speed was enhanced by the exclusion process, which depended upon the cell-packing fraction. Finally, we qualitatively compared our theoretical results with experimental evidence.