The mechanical world of bacteria.

In the wild, bacteria are predominantly associated with surfaces as opposed to existing as free-swimming, isolated organisms. They are thus subject to surface-specific mechanics, including hydrodynamic forces, adhesive forces, the rheology of their surroundings, and transport rules that define their encounters with nutrients and signaling molecules. Here, we highlight the effects of mechanics on bacterial behaviors on surfaces at multiple length scales, from single bacteria to the development of multicellular bacterial communities such as biofilms.

Tuning the Receding Contact Angle on Hydrogels by Addition of Particles.

Control of the swelling, chemical functionalization, and adhesivity of hydrogels are finding new applications in a wide range of material systems. We investigate experimentally the effect of adsorbed particles on hydrogels on the depinning of contact lines. In our experiments, a water drop containing polystyrene microspheres is deposited on a swelling hydrogel, which leads to the drop absorption and particle deposition. Two regimes are observed: a decreasing drop height with a pinned contact line followed by a receding contact line. We show that increasing the particles concentration increases the duration of the first regime and significantly decreases the total absorption time. The adsorbed particles increase the pinning force at the contact line. Finally, we develop a method to measure the receding contact angle with the consideration of the hydrogel swelling.

Coffee-stain growth dynamics on dry and wet surfaces.

The drying of a drop containing particles often results in the accumulation of the particles at the contact line. In this work, we investigate the drying of an aqueous colloidal drop surrounded by a hydrogel that is also evaporating. We combine theoretical and experimental studies to understand how the surrounding vapor concentration affects the particle deposit during the constant radius evaporation mode. In addition to the common case of evaporation on an otherwise dry surface, we show that in a configuration where liquid is evaporating from a flat surface around the drop, the singularity of the evaporative flux at the contact line is suppressed and the drop evaporation is homogeneous. For both conditions, we derive the velocity field and we establish the temporal evolution of the number of particles accumulated at the contact line. We predict the growth dynamics of the stain and the drying timescales. Thus, dry and wet conditions are compared with experimental results and we highlight that only the dynamics is modified by the evaporation conditions, not the final accumulation at the contact line.

Local and global consequences of flow on bacterial quorum sensing.

Bacteria use a chemical communication process called quorum sensing (QS) to control collective behaviours such as pathogenesis and biofilm formation(1,2). QS relies on the production, release and group-wide detection of signal molecules called autoinducers. To date, studies of bacterial pathogenesis in well-mixed cultures have revealed virulence factors and the regulatory circuits controlling them, including the overarching role of QS(3). Although flow is ubiquitous to nearly all living systems(4), much less explored is how QS influences pathogenic traits in scenarios that mimic host environments, for example, under fluid flow and in complex geometries. Previous studies(5-7) have shown that sufficiently strong flow represses QS. Nonetheless, it is not known how QS functions under constant or intermittent flow, how it varies within biofilms or as a function of position along a confined flow, or how surface topography (grooves, crevices, pores) influence QS-mediated communication. We explore these questions using two common pathogens, Staphylococcus aureus and Vibrio cholerae. We identify conditions where flow represses QS and other conditions where QS is activated despite flow, including characterizing geometric and topographic features that influence the QS response. Our studies highlight that, under flow, genetically identical cells do not exhibit phenotypic uniformity with respect to QS in space and time, leading to complex patterns of pathogenesis and colonization. Understanding the ramifications of spatially and temporally non-uniform QS responses in realistic environments will be crucial for successful deployment of synthetic pro- and anti-QS strategies.