Interplay between environmental yielding and dynamic forcing modulates bacterial growth.

ABSTRACT: Many bacterial habitats-ranging from gels and tissues in the body to cell-secreted exopolysaccharides in biofilms-are rheologically complex, undergo dynamic external forcing, and have unevenly distributed nutrients. How do these features jointly influence how the resident cells grow and proliferate? Here, we address this question by studying the growth of Escherichia coli dispersed in granular hydrogel matrices with defined and highly tunable structural and rheological properties, under different amounts of external forcing imposed by mechanical shaking, and in both aerobic and anaerobic conditions. Our experiments establish a general principle: that the balance between the yield stress of the environment that the cells inhabit, σ_y, and the external stress imposed on the environ

SUBMITTER: Hancock AM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11052696 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature