Filling an emulsion drop with motile bacteria.

We have measured the spatial distribution of motile Escherichia coli inside spherical water droplets emulsified in oil. At low cell concentrations, the cell density peaks at the water-oil interface; at increasing concentration, the bulk of each droplet fills up uniformly while the surface peak remains. Simulations and theory show that the bulk density results from a "traffic" of cells leaving the surface layer, increasingly due to cell-cell scattering as the surface coverage rises above ∼10%. Our findings show similarities with the physics of a rarefied gas in a spherical cavity with attractive walls.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  Physical Review Letters

• Publication date

  2014-07-25

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Physics, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.268101arXiv 1407.6859PMID 25615389
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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