Biofilms are consortia of microorganisms that form collectives through the excretion of
extracellular matrix compounds. The importance of biofilms in biological, industrial and …

Bacteria can regulate cell morphology in response to environmental conditions, altering their
physiological and metabolic characteristics to improve survival. Conditional filamentation, in …

Theories of consciousness and cognition that assume a neural substrate automatically
regard phylogenetically basal, nonneural systems as nonconscious and noncognitive. Here …

The ability of microorganisms to grow as aggregated assemblages has been known for
many years, however their structure has remained largely unexplored across multiple spatial …

Bacteria have spectacular survival capabilities and can spread in many, vastly different
environments. For instance, when pathogenic bacteria infect a host, they expand by …

The emergence of large-scale order in self-organized systems relies on local interactions
between individual components. During bacterial cell division, FtsZ—a prokaryotic …

In many rod-shaped bacteria, the actin homolog MreB directs cell-wall insertion and
maintains cell shape, but it remains unclear how structural changes to MreB affect its …

Microorganisms are a fundamental part of virtually every ecosystem on earth. Understanding
how collectively they interact, assemble, and function as communities has become a …

Genetic fluctuation during range expansion is a key process driving evolution. When a
bacterial population is expanding on a 2D surface, random fluctuations in the growth of the …

We experimentally and numerically investigate the evolutionary dynamics of four competing
strains of E. coli with differing expansion velocities in radially expanding colonies. We …