ArticleNature communications2025
Spatiotemporal development of expanding bacterial colonies driven by emergent mechanical constraints and nutrient gradients.
Article in Nature communications, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Comparative analysis of phenotype and gene expression in Saccharomyces cerevisiae grown in solid versus liquid culture formats.BMC microbiology · 2026Article
- Transition from traveling fronts to diffusion-limited growth in expanding populations.Physical review. E · 2026Article
- Article
- Investigating Salmonella biofilm responses to antibiotic treatment using optical photothermal infrared spectroscopy.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Inductive bias influences the spatial scale of biological features learned from images.Bioinformatics advances · 2026Article
- Biophysics of Bacterial Colonial Structures and the Occupancy of Microecological Spaces.Biology · 2025Review
- Swashing: a propulsion-independent form of bacterial surface migration.Journal of bacteriology · 2025Article
- Single-cell lysis patterns morphogenesis of eDNA in the matrix ofProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Spatial self-organization of confined bacterial suspensions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Dissecting the physics of bacterial biofilms with agent-based simulations.Current opinion in solid state & materials science · 2025Article
- Metabolically driven flows enable exponential growth in macroscopic multicellular yeast.Science advances · 2025Article
- Metabolically-driven flows enable exponential growth in macroscopic multicellular yeast.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
13 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Bacterial colonies growing on solid surfaces can exhibit robust expansion kinetics, with constant radial growth and saturating vertical expansion, suggesting a common developmental program. Here, we study this process for Escherichia coli cells using a combination of modeling and experiments. We show that linear radial colony expansion is set by the verticalization of interior cells due to mechanical constraints rather than radial nutrient gradients as commonly assumed. In contrast, vertical expansion slows down from an initial linear regime even while radial expansion continues linearly. This vertical slowdown is due to limitation of cell growth caused by vertical nutrient gradients, exacerbated by concurrent oxygen depletion. Starvation in the colony interior results in a distinct death zone which sets in as vertical expansion slows down, with the death zone increasing in size along with the expanding colony. Thus, our study reveals complex heterogeneity within simple monoclonal bacterial colonies, especially along the vertical dimension. The intricate dynamics of such emergent behavior can be understood quantitatively from an interplay of mechanical constraints and nutrient gradients arising from obligatory metabolic processes.
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What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.