Complexity Digest 2011.16 - 11

2011/08/19

Editor-in-Chief: Carlos Gershenson
Founding Editor: Gottfried Mayer

Universality in Bacterial Colonies, arXiv Bookmark and Share

Excerpt: The emergent spatial patterns generated by growing bacterial colonies have been the focus of intense study in physics during the last twenty years. Both experimental and theoretical investigations have made possible a clear qualitative picture of the different structures that such colonies can exhibit, depending on the medium on which they are growing. However, there are relatively few quantitative descriptions of these patterns. In this paper, we use a mechanistically detailed simulation framework to measure the scaling exponents associated with the advancing fronts of bacterial colonies on hard agar substrata, aiming to discern the universality class to which the system belongs. We show that the universal behavior exhibited by the colonies can be much richer than previously reported, (…)