Toward a realistic model of multilayered bacterial colonies

Abstract

Bacteria are prolific at colonizing diverse surfaces under a widerange of environmental conditions, and exhibit fascinating examples of self-organization across scales. Though it has recently attracted considerable interest, the role of mechanical forces in the collective behavior of bacterial colonies is not yet fully understood. Here, we construct a model of growing rod-like bacteria, such as Escherichia coli based purely on mechanical forces. We perform overdamped molecular dynamics simulations of the colony starting from a few cells in contact with a surface. As the colony grows, microdomains of strongly aligned cells grow and proliferate. Our model captures both the initial growth of a bacterial colony and also shows characteristic signs of capturing the experimentally observed transition to multilayered colonies over longer timescales. We compare our results with experiments on E. coli cells and analyze the statistics of microdomains.