Issue 48, 2019

Confinement and activity regulate bacterial motion in porous media

Abstract

Understanding how bacteria move in porous media is critical to applications in healthcare, agriculture, environmental remediation, and chemical sensing. Recent work has demonstrated that E. coli, which moves by run-and-tumble dynamics in a homogeneous medium, exhibits a new form of motility when confined in a disordered porous medium: hopping-and-trapping motility, in which cells perform rapid, directed hops punctuated by intervals of slow, undirected trapping. Here, we use direct visualization to shed light on how these processes depend on pore-scale confinement and cellular activity. We find that hopping is determined by pore-scale confinement, and is independent of cellular activity; by contrast, trapping is determined by the competition between pore-scale confinement and cellular activity, as predicted by an entropic trapping model. These results thus help to elucidate the factors that regulate bacterial motion in porous media, and could help aid the development of new models of motility in heterogeneous environments.

Graphical abstract: Confinement and activity regulate bacterial motion in porous media

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
26 Aug 2019
Accepted
13 Nov 2019
First published
14 Nov 2019

Soft Matter, 2019,15, 9920-9930

Author version available

Confinement and activity regulate bacterial motion in porous media

T. Bhattacharjee and S. S. Datta, Soft Matter, 2019, 15, 9920 DOI: 10.1039/C9SM01735F

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