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MICROBIAL BIOPHYSICS

A living liquid crystal dissected

Nature Physics volume 15, pages 207–208 (2019)Cite this article

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A large-scale imaging study has tracked thousands of bacteria living in three-dimensional biofilms. This technical tour de force reveals the importance of mechanical interactions between cells for building local and global structure.

Biofilms of rod-shaped bacteria self-organize in space and time in a manner reminiscent of nematic liquid crystals1. Like their abiotic counterparts, the global organization of these living liquid crystals is expected to emerge from the local interactions between their constituents — namely individual bacteria. But this hypothesis has not yet been validated in a systematic way, due to the difficulty of mapping all bacteria in a biofilm with sufficient spatial and temporal resolution as they proliferate. Now, writing in Nature Physics, Raimo Hartmann and colleagues2 have accomplished this feat by imaging biofilms of up to tens of thousands of cells.

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Fig. 1: Identifying a cell–cell interaction potential for 3D biofilms.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Experimental and Health Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain

    Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo

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  1. Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo
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Correspondence to Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo.

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Garcia-Ojalvo, J. A living liquid crystal dissected. Nat. Phys. 15, 207–208 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-018-0373-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-018-0373-8

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