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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Microbial narrow-escape is facilitated by wall interactions

Mathieu Souzy1,*, Antoine Allard2,*, Jean-François Louf3, Matteo Contino2, Idan Tuval4,5,†, and Marco Polin2,4,5,‡

  • 1Physics of Fluids, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500AE Enschede, The Netherlands
  • 2Department of Physics, University of Warwick, Gibbet Hill Road, Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom
  • 3Department of Chemical Engineering, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama 36849, USA
  • 4Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies, IMEDEA, UIB-CSIC, Esporles 07190, Spain
  • 5Physics Department, Universitat de les Illes Balears, Palma de Mallorca 07122, Spain

  • *These authors contributed equally to this work.
  • †ituval@imedea.uib-csic.es
  • ‡mpolin@imedea.uib-csic.es
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Phys. Rev. Research 4, L022029 – Published 5 May, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.L022029

Abstract

Cells have evolved efficient strategies to probe their surroundings and navigate through complex environments. From metastatic spread in the body to swimming cells in porous materials, escape through narrow constrictions—a key component of any structured environment connecting isolated microdomains—is one ubiquitous and crucial aspect of cell exploration. Here, using the model microalgae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, we combine experiments and simulations to achieve a tractable realization of the classical Brownian narrow-escape problem in the context of active confined matter. Our results differ from those expected for Brownian particles or leaking chaotic billiards and demonstrate that cell-wall interactions substantially modify escape rates and, under generic conditions, expedite spread dynamics.

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  38. See Supplemental Material at http://link.aps.org/supplemental/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.L022029 doi for the following: (i) a movie of algae moving through a network of pools interconnected by channels; the movie highlights two portions of distinct algae trajectories detected by the particle tracking algorithm, which illustrate a corner and a direct escape from a pool; (ii) a movie highlighting the detected track of an alga, and its trace; (iii) figures that display the distribution of cell velocity (Fig. S1), the traveled distance in the pool from simulation using the peak value for θout (Fig. S2) and using the full experimental distribution (Fig. S3), and a table recapitulating the goodness of fit to derive escape rates (Table S1); and (iv) the simulation codes and simulation results used throughout the Letter.

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Phys. Rev. Research 4, L022029– Published 5 May, 2022
  • Received 4 October 2021
  • Accepted 15 February 2022
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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