The fascinating patterns of collective motion created by autonomously driven particles have
fuelled active-matter research for over two decades. So far, theoretical active-matter …

Bacterial growth presents many beautiful phenomena that pose new theoretical challenges
to statistical physicists, and are also amenable to laboratory experimentation. This review …

How do growing bacterial colonies get their shapes? While colony morphogenesis is well
studied in two dimensions, many bacteria grow as large colonies in three-dimensional (3D) …

Biofilms are structured communities formed by a single or multiple microbial species. Within
biofilms, bacteria are embedded into extracellular matrix, allowing them to build …

Membrane potential in bacterial systems has been shown to be dynamic and tightly related
to survivability at the single-cell level. However, little is known about spatiotemporal patterns …

During the biofilm life cycle, bacteria attach to a surface and then reproduce, forming
crowded, growing communities. Many theoretical models of biofilm growth dynamics have …

Bacterial swarming and biofilm formation are collective multicellular phenomena through
which diverse microbial species colonize and spread over water-permeable tissue. During …

In contexts ranging from embryonic development to bacterial ecology, cell populations
migrate chemotactically along self-generated chemical gradients, often forming a …

Many cellular populations are tightly packed, such as microbial colonies and biofilms, or
tissues and tumours in multicellular organisms. The movement of one cell in these crowded …

Bacterial biofilms are surface-attached microbial communities encased in self-produced
extracellular polymeric substances. Here we demonstrate that during the development of …