We have just posted our latest work in biological physics on arXiv. The article “Substrate geometry affects population dynamics in a bacterial biofilm“, co-authored by Witold Postek, Klaudia Staśkiewicz, Elin Lilja, and Bartlomiej Waclaw, combines microfluidic experiments and computational models to show how biological evolution and population dynamics of bacteria can be controlled by micro-patterning the surface on which the bacteria form a colony (a biofilm).
We introduce fluorescent bacteria into micro-wells with a corrugated surface, in which the bacteria develop biofilms, and track their dynamics using microscopy. We show that surface undulations arrest the spreading of faster-growing (fitter) variants of bacteria, which has potential implications for both medicine (antibiotic resistance) and industry (engineered microbial communities).
Dioscuri Centre for Physics and Chemistry of Bacteria 