Motility-Induced Patterning in Signalling Bacteria

WesleyRidgway

University of Oxford

"Motility-Induced Patterning in Signalling Bacteria"

Chemical signaling, or quorum sensing (QS), promotes collective behaviour in bacteria, from biofilm formation to swarming. By coupling QS systems with genes that control motility, bacteria can be engineered to generate tunable spatio-temporal patterns in vitro. However, it is not well-understood in general how the type of gene-regulatory network affects emergent population-level patterning. In this talk, we investigate the effect of the gene-regulatory network on emergent patterning in a population of motile bacteria that interact via QS. By formally upscaling a cell-level model in a biologically relevant scaling regime, we derive a continuum model that explicitly accounts for genetic regulation of motility and signal production through chemical structuring. Using a WKBJ-like framework, we derive criteria for the onset of two types of emergent patterning for a canonical QS circuit. We also uncover a new route to the well-known phenomenon of motility-induced phase separation (MIPS) through genetic regulation of tumbling frequency. Lastly, we discuss generalisations of our WKBJ-like analysis to more complex gene-regulatory networks that exhibit bistability.
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