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Self-Driven Jamming in Growing Microbial Populations

Morgan Delarue, Jörn Hartung, Carl Schreck, Pawel Gniewek, Lucy Hu, Stephan Herminghaus, Oskar Hallatschek
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/052480
Morgan Delarue
1Departments of Physics and Integrative Biology, University of California Berkeley, USA.
†MD and JH equally contributed to this work.
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Jörn Hartung
2Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization Göttingen, Germany.
†MD and JH equally contributed to this work.
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Carl Schreck
1Departments of Physics and Integrative Biology, University of California Berkeley, USA.
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Pawel Gniewek
1Departments of Physics and Integrative Biology, University of California Berkeley, USA.
3Biophysics Graduate Group, University of California Berkeley, USA.
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Lucy Hu
4Department of Bioengineering, University of California Berkeley, USA.
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Stephan Herminghaus
2Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization Göttingen, Germany.
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Oskar Hallatschek
1Departments of Physics and Integrative Biology, University of California Berkeley, USA.
2Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization Göttingen, Germany.
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Abstract

In natural settings, microbes tend to grow in dense populations [1–4] where they need to push against their surroundings to accommodate space for new cells. The associated contact forces play a critical role in a variety of population-level processes, including biofilm formation [5–7], the colonization of porous media [8, 9], and the invasion of biological tissues [10–12]. Although mechanical forces have been characterized at the single cell level [13–16], it remains elusive how collective pushing forces result from the combination of single cell forces. Here, we reveal a collective mechanism of confinement, which we call self-driven jamming, that promotes the build-up of large mechanical pressures in microbial populations. Microfluidic experiments on budding yeast populations in space-limited environments show that self-driven jamming arises from the gradual formation and sudden collapse of force chains driven by microbial proliferation, extending the framework of driven granular matter [17–20]. The resulting contact pressures can become large enough to slow down cell growth by delaying the cell cycle in the G1 phase and to strain or even destroy the microenvironment through crack propagation. Our results suggest that self-driven jamming and build-up of large mechanical pressures is a natural tendency of microbes growing in confined spaces, contributing to microbial pathogenesis and biofouling [21–26].

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted May 11, 2016.
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Self-Driven Jamming in Growing Microbial Populations
Morgan Delarue, Jörn Hartung, Carl Schreck, Pawel Gniewek, Lucy Hu, Stephan Herminghaus, Oskar Hallatschek
bioRxiv 052480; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/052480
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Self-Driven Jamming in Growing Microbial Populations
Morgan Delarue, Jörn Hartung, Carl Schreck, Pawel Gniewek, Lucy Hu, Stephan Herminghaus, Oskar Hallatschek
bioRxiv 052480; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/052480

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