Experiments have shown that wild type P. aeruginosa swarms much faster than rhlAB mutants on 0.4% agar concentration surface. These observations imply that development of a liquid thin film is an important component of the self-organized swarming process. A multiscale model is presented in this paper for studying interplay of key hydrodynamical and biological mechanisms involved in the swarming...

Collective navigation and swarming have been studied in animal groups, such as fish schools, bird flocks, bacteria, and slime molds. Computer modeling has shown that collective behavior of simple agents can result from simple interactions between the agents, which include short range repulsion, intermediate range alignment, and long range attraction. Here we study collective navigation of bacte...

ENABLING PEER-TO-PEER SWARMING FOR MULTI-COMMODITY DISSEMINATION

Proteus mirabilis colonies exhibit striking geometric regularity. Basic microbiological methods and imaging techniques were used to measure periodic macroscopic events in swarm colony morphogenesis. We distinguished three initial phases (lag phase, first swarming phase, and first consolidation phase) followed by repeating cycles of subsequent swarming plus consolidation phases. Each Proteus swa...

BACKGROUND Variovorax paradoxus is an aerobic soil bacterium associated with important biodegradative processes in nature. We use V. paradoxus EPS to study multicellular behaviors on surfaces. METHODOLOGY We recovered flanking sequence from 123 clones in a Tn5 mutant library, with insertions in 29 different genes, selected based on observed surface behavior phenotypes. We identified three gen...

In this work, we describe a new gene controlling lateral flagellar gene expression. The gene encodes ScrG, a protein containing GGDEF and EAL domains. This is the second GGDEF-EAL-encoding locus determined to be involved in the regulation of swarming: the first was previously characterized and named scrABC (for "swarming and capsular polysaccharide regulation"). GGDEF and EAL domain-containing ...

Salmonella enterica serotype Typhimurium can move through liquid using swimming motility, and across a surface by swarming motility. We generated a library of targeted deletion mutants in Salmonella Typhimurium strain ATCC14028, primarily in genes specific to Salmonella, that we have previously described. In the work presented here, we screened each individual mutant from this library for the a...

Camellia nitidissima Chi, known as a medicinal and edible plant in China, exhibits multiple bioactivities, especially antibacterial activity. In this study, we investigated the inhibitory effects of the dichloromethane fraction (DF) of C. nitidissima Chi flowers on the pyocyanin production, swarming motility, and swimming motility of Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1, at sub-minimum inhibitory concen...

Swarming motility is suggested to be a social phenomenon that enables groups of bacteria to coordinately and rapidly move atop solid surfaces. This multicellular behavior, during which the apparently organized bacterial populations are embedded in an extracellular slime layer, has previously been linked with biofilm formation and virulence. Many population density-controlled activities involve ...

A swarming mobile sensor network is comprised of a swarm of wirelessly connected mobile robots equipped with various sensors. Such a network can be applied in an uncertain environment for services such as cooperative navigation and exploration, object identification and information gathering. One of the most advantageous properties of the swarming wireless sensor network is that mobile nodes ca...