Discoidal microbial colonies

Intercellular Genomics of Subsurface Microbial Colonies

Selective sweeps in growing microbial colonies.

Evolutionary experiments with microbes are a powerful tool to study mutations and natural selection. These experiments, however, are often limited to the well-mixed environments of a test tube or a chemostat. Since spatial organization can significantly affect evolutionary dynamics, the need is growing for evolutionary experiments in spatially structured environments. The surface of a Petri dis...

Mechanically driven growth of quasi-two-dimensional microbial colonies.

We study colonies of nonmotile, rod-shaped bacteria growing on solid substrates. In our model, bacteria interact purely mechanically, by pushing each other away as they grow, and consume a diffusing nutrient. We show that mechanical interactions control the velocity and shape of the advancing front, which leads to features that cannot be captured by established Fisher-Kolmogorov models. In part...

Factors influencing microbial colonies in the air of operating rooms

BACKGROUND The operating room (OR) of the hospital is a special unit that requires a relatively clean environment. The microbial concentration of an indoor OR extrinsically influences surgical site infection rates. The aim of this study was to use active sampling methods to assess microbial colony counts in working ORs and to determine the factors affecting air contamination in a tertiary refer...

Supplementary information for"Selective sweeps in growing microbial colonies"

This is supplementary information for arXiv:1204.4896, which also appeared in Physical Biology 9, 026008 (2012). In this supplementary information, we first describe in section S1 the methods used in the main text. We then show that the macroscopic spatio-genetic patterns of spatial competitions are independent of microscopic details, using both experimental and theoretical arguments: In sectio...