Micoorganisms are usually denser than the medium they live in, and therefore have the tendency to sediment. When they’re motile, this might not look like a big problem, but when they are not… well… they need to find a way to stay afloat. How do they do it? We are lucky to have been involved in a very interesting project led by Joseph Christie-Oleza on the sinking behaviour of cyanobacteria. It turns out that pili help cyanos stay afloat! And, surprisingly, help fend off grazers as well. The results have just been published in Nature Communications. Congrats to all and in particular to Joseph!

Absolutely delighted that Iago’s paper on the transition from bacterial swarming to biofilms is now out on eLife.

When the expansion of a B. subtilis swarm is hindered (even just by a simple barrier!) cells at the front pile up through a physical process similar to a traffic jam (a transient one in the movie!). This in turn leads to the emergence of a localised biofilm. This is the first direct report we could find of a transition between swarming and biofilm! Great work by Iago and fab collaboration with Munehiro Asally!

Ah! …here’s eLife‘s press release!

We recently had the great opportunity to collaborate with Darius Koester to study the behaviour of myosin II bundles and actin filaments. Our side of the work was spearheaded by Lewis Mosby, who adapted a Python library originally used to feature galaxies to recognise the myosin bundles, and analysed in great detail their motile behaviour. Part of this work is published in The Biophysical Journal  (preprint here). The detailed description of the myosin tracking can be found in a Special Issue of The Journal of Physics D, from the IOP (preprint here).

From soil bacteria to sperm swimming in the fallopian tubes, microorganisms are often found to swim within confined environments. What is the effect of confinement on their flow fields? In a new paper, recently published in Physical Review Letters, we combine experiment and modelling to show that -contrary to expectations- the variety of microbial flow fields is greatly increased under confinement. This can in turn have have qualitative effects on both the biology (e.g., feeding currents) and the physics (e.g., collective behaviour) of microorganisms in confinement. This work was done in collaboration with Raphael Jeanneret and Mitya Pushkin.