2025/01/29 by Premkumar Leishangthem, Xuan Wang, Leishangthem, Premkumar +6
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Engineering · #Biological Physics (physics.bio-ph) #Diffusion and Search Dynamics #FOS: Physical sciences #Gut microbiota and health #Molecular Communication and Nanonetworks #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft) #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2501.17477
openalex publication_date 2025/01/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Run-and-tumble is a common but vital strategy that bacteria employ to explore environment suffused with boundaries, as well as to escape from entrapment. In this study we reveal how this strategy and the resulting dynamical behavior can be sensitively regulated by bacterial dimensions. Our results demonstrate that the logarithm of the surface residence time for bacteria with constant tumble bias is linearly related to a dimensionless parameter of bacterial intrinsic size characteristics, where a small variation in bacterial dimensions, which is natural in a suspension, reproduces well the experimentally observed large variation in bacterial residence time. Furthermore, our results predict that the optimal tumble bias corresponding to the maximum surface diffusivity depends strongly on bacterial dimensions, where the same small variation in bacterial dimensions gives rise to a strongly diversified optimal tumble bias and an order of magnitude change in surface diffusivity.