SFB 1313 Publication "Influence of bacterial swimming and hydrodynamics on attachment of phages"

A new SFB 1313 publication is published in "Soft Matter". The work has been developed by researchers involved in Project C01.

Influence of bacterial swimming and hydrodynamics on attachment of phages

Authors

• Christoph Lohrmann (University of Stuttgart, research project C01)  
• Christian Holm (University of Stuttgart, research project C01)
• Sujit S. Datta  (Princeton University)

Abstract

Bacteriophages (“phages”) are viruses that infect bacteria. Since they do not actively self-propel, phages rely on thermal diffusion to find target cells—but can also be advected by fluid flows, such as those generated by motile bacteria themselves in bulk fluids. How does the flow field generated by a swimming bacterium influence how it encounters phages? Here, we address this question using coupled molecular dynamics and lattice Boltzmann simulations of flagellated bacteria swimming through a bulk fluid containing uniformly-dispersed phages. We find that while swimming increases the rate at which phages attach to both the cell body and flagellar propeller, hydrodynamic interactions strongly suppress this increase at the cell body, but conversely enhance this increase at the flagellar bundle. Our results highlight the pivotal influence of hydrodynamics on the interactions between bacteria and phages, as well as other diffusible species, in microbial environments.

< 1 , which indicates a strong intensity of physical processes on the boundary, described by the inhomogeneity φ ε (the cases α = 1 and α > 1 were previously studied by the same authors). A complete Puiseux asymptotic expansion is constructed for the solution u ε as ε → 0 , i.e., when the diffusion coefficients are eliminated and the thin network shrinks into a graph. Furthermore, the corresponding uniform pointwise and energy estimates are proved, which provide an approximation of the solution with a given accuracy in terms of the parameter ε .