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Bacterial Route Finding and Collective Escape in Mazes and Fractals

Trung V. Phan

Ryan Morris

Matthew E. Black

Tuan K. Do

Ke-Chih Lin

Krisztina Nagy

James C. Sturm

Julia Bos

Robert H. Austin

  • Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton 08544, New Jersey, USA

  • Department Of Physics, Edinburgh University, Edinburgh EH9 3FD, United Kingdom

  • Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University, Princeton 08544, New Jersey, USA

  • Department of Mathematics, Princeton University, Princeton 08544, New Jersey, USA

  • Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton 08544, New Jersey, USA

  • Institute of Biophysics, Biological Research Centre, Temesvari krt. 62, H-6726 Szeged, Hungary

  • Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton 08544, New Jersey, USA

  • Departement Genomes et Genetics, Institut Pasteur, UMR3525, CNRS, Paris 75015, France

  • Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton 08544, New Jersey, USA

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Phys. Rev. X 10, 031017 – Published 22 July, 2020

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.10.031017

Abstract

Bacteria which grow not on the featureless agar plates of the microbiology lab but in the real world must navigate topologies which are nontrivially complex, such as mazes or fractals. We show that chemosensitive motile E. coli can efficiently explore nontrivial mazes in times much shorter than a no-memory (Markovian) walk would predict, and can collectively escape from a fractal topology. The strategies used by the bacteria include individual power-law probability distribution function exploration, the launching of chemotactic collective waves with preferential branching at maze nodes and defeating of fractal pumping, and bet hedging in case the more risky attempts to find food fail.

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Popular Summary

Bacteria outside of the lab must often navigate complex environments in search of food. A better understanding of how bacteria find their way might help researchers develop strategies to inhibit bacterial infections. To that end, we probe to what extent the common bacteria E. coli explores landscapes that have much in common with structures experienced in nature—fractals and mazes—and find that they appear to have evolved a variety of ways to navigate these puzzles.

Fractals are scale-free topologies that repeat themselves with increasing magnification. A maze is not scale free but has many possible paths, with some leading quickly to an exit and others requiring a much longer time. While our designed puzzles seem simplistic, we aim to capture the essence of how bacteria navigate and escape more complex structures and reveal the emergent collective behavior of challenges to survival. For both types of puzzles, the bacteria employ several strategies to efficiently explore the territory, escaping in less time than would be expected if the bacteria moved randomly.

We caution that there are many aspects of these experiments we do not yet understand. In microbiology research, control experiments are difficult because one often must resort to controls using different strains of bacteria, which may have their own altered (unexpected) behavior. We believe that the phenomena we see are emergent: They cannot be easily predicted from a bottoms-up approach and they might not appear if the bacteria are not presented with a similar challenge.

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Phys. Rev. X 10, 031017– Published 22 July, 2020
  • Received 29 September 2019
  • Revised 31 March 2020
  • Accepted 20 May 2020
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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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