Active Spaghetti: Collective Organization in Cyanobacteria.

Filamentous cyanobacteria can show fascinating examples of nonequilibrium self-organization, which, however, are not well understood from a physical perspective. We investigate the motility and collective organization of colonies of these simple multicellular lifeforms. As their area density increases, linear chains of cells gliding on a substrate show a transition from an isotropic distribution to bundles of filaments arranged in a reticulate pattern. Based on our experimental observations of individual behavior and pairwise interactions, we introduce a nonreciprocal model accounting for the filaments' large aspect ratio, fluctuations in curvature, motility, and nematic interactions. This minimal model of active filaments recapitulates the observations, and rationalizes the appearance of a characteristic length scale in the system, based on the Péclet number of the cyanobacteria filaments.

• Publication year

  2023

• Venue

  Physical Review Letters

• Publication date

  2023-01-27

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Physics, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.158303arXiv 2301.11667PMID 37897773
• 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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