Topology transcends boundaries that conventionally delineate physical, biological, and engineering sciences. Our ability to mathematically describe topology, combined with recent access to precision ...tracking and manipulation approaches, has triggered a fresh appreciation of topological ramifications in biological systems. Microbial ecosystems, a classic example of living matter, offer a rich test bed for exploring the role of topological defects in shaping community compositions, structure, and functions spanning orders in length and time scales. Microbial activity—characteristic of such structured, out-of-equilibrium systems—triggers emergent processes that endow evolutionary and ecological benefits to microbial communities. The scene stealer of this developing cross-disciplinary field of research is the topological defects: singularities that nucleate due to spontaneous symmetry breaking within the microbial system or within the surrounding material field. The interplay of geometry, order, and topology elicit novel, if not unexpected dynamics that are at the heart of active and emergent processes in such living systems. In this short review, I have put together a summary of the key recent advances that highlight the interface of active liquid crystal physics and the physical ecology of microbes; and combined it with original data from experiments on sessile species as a case to demonstrate how this interface offers a biophysical framework that could help to decode and harness active microbial processes in true ecological settings. Topology and its functional manifestations—a crucial and well-timed topic—offer a rich opportunity for both experimentalists and theoreticians willing to take up an exciting journey across scales and disciplines.
The coupling between flow and director orientation of liquid crystals (LCs) has been long utilized to devise wide-ranging applications spanning modern displays, medical and environmental solutions, ...and bio-inspired designs and applications. LC-based optofluidic platforms offer a non-invasive handle to modulate light and material fields, both locally and dynamically. The flow-driven reorientation of the LC molecules can tailor distinct optical and mechanical responses in microfluidic confinements, and harness the coupling therein. Yet the synergy between traditional optofluidics with isotropic fluids and LC microfluidics remains at its infancy. Here, we discuss emerging optofluidic concepts based on
Topological Microfluidics
, leveraging microfluidic control of topological defects and defect landscapes. With a specific focus on the role of surface anchoring and microfluidic geometry, we present recent and ongoing works that harness flow-controlled director and defect configurations to modulate optical fields. The flow-induced optical attributes, and the corresponding feedback, is enhanced in the vicinity of the topological defects which geenerate distinct isotropic opto-material properties within an anisotropic matrix. By harnessing the rich interplay of confining geometry, anchoring and micro-scale nematodynamics,
topological microfluidics
offers a promising platform to ideate the next generation of optofluidic and optomechnical concepts.
Flow of molecularly ordered fluids, like liquid crystals, is inherently coupled with the average local orientation of the molecules, or the director. The anisotropic coupling-typically absent in ...isotropic fluids-bestows unique functionalities to the flowing matrix. In this work, we harness this anisotropy to pattern different pathways to tunable fluidic resistance within microfluidic devices. We use a nematic liquid crystalline material flowing in microchannels to demonstrate passive and active modulation of the flow resistance. While appropriate surface anchoring conditions-which imprint distinct fluidic resistances within microchannels under similar hydrodynamic parameters-act as passive cues, an external field, e.g., temperature, is used to actively modulate the flow resistance in the microfluidic device. We apply this simple concept to fabricate basic fluidic circuits, which can be hierarchically extended to create complex resistance networks, without any additional design or morphological patterning of the microchannels.
Microbes thrive in diverse porous environments—from soil and riverbeds to human lungs and cancer tissues—spanning multiple scales and conditions. Short- to long-term fluctuations in local factors ...induce spatio-temporal heterogeneities, often leading to physiologically stressful settings. How microbes respond and adapt to such biophysical constraints is an active field of research where considerable insight has been gained over the last decades. With a focus on bacteria, here we review recent advances in self-organization and dispersal in inorganic and organic porous settings, highlighting the role of active interactions and feedback that mediates microbial survival and fitness. We discuss open questions and opportunities for using integrative approaches to advance our understanding of the biophysical strategies which microbes employ at various scales to make porous settings habitable.
Bacterial colonies are abundant on living and nonliving surfaces and are known to mediate a broad range of processes in ecology, medicine, and industry. Although extensively researched, from single ...cells to demographic scales, a comprehensive biomechanical picture, highlighting the cell-to-colony dynamics, is still lacking. Here, using molecular dynamics simulations and continuous modeling, we investigate the geometrical and mechanical properties of a bacterial colony growing on a substrate with a free boundary and demonstrate that such an expanding colony self-organizes into a “mosaic” of microdomains consisting of highly aligned cells. The emergence of microdomains is mediated by two competing forces: the steric forces between neighboring cells, which favor cell alignment, and the extensile stresses due to cell growth that tend to reduce the local orientational order and thereby distort the system. This interplay results in an exponential distribution of the domain areas and sets a characteristic length scale proportional to the square root of the ratio between the system orientational stiffness and the magnitude of the extensile active stress. Our theoretical predictions are finally compared with experiments with freely growing E. coli microcolonies, finding quantitative agreement.
The transition from monolayers to multilayered structures in bacterial colonies is a fundamental step in biofilm development. Observed across different morphotypes and species, this transition is ...triggered within freely growing bacterial microcolonies comprising a few hundred cells. Using a combination of numerical simulations and analytical modeling, here we demonstrate that this transition originates from the competition between growth-induced in-plane active stresses and vertical restoring forces, due to the cell-substrate interactions. Using a simple chainlike colony of laterally confined cells, we show that the transition sets when individual cells become unstable to rotations; thus it is localized and mechanically deterministic. Asynchronous cell division renders the process stochastic, so that all the critical parameters that control the onset of the transition are continuously distributed random variables. Here we demonstrate that the occurrence of the first division in the colony can be approximated as a Poisson process in the limit of large cell numbers. This allows us to approximately calculate the probability distribution function of the position and time associated with the first extrusion. The rate of such a Poisson process can be identified as the order parameter of the transition, thus highlighting its mixed deterministic-stochastic nature.
Abstract
The variation associated with different observable characteristics—phenotypes—at the cellular scale underpins homeostasis and the fitness of living systems. However, if and how these noisy ...phenotypic traits shape properties at the population level remains poorly understood. Here we report that phenotypic noise self-regulates with growth and coordinates collective structural organization, the kinetics of topological defects and the emergence of active transport around confluent colonies. We do this by cataloguing key phenotypic traits in bacteria growing under diverse conditions. Our results reveal a statistically precise critical time for the transition from a monolayer biofilm to a multilayer biofilm, despite the strong noise in the cell geometry and the colony area at the onset of the transition. This reveals a mitigation mechanism between the noise in the cell geometry and the growth rate that dictates the narrow critical time window. By uncovering how rectification of phenotypic noise homogenizes correlated collective properties across colonies, our work points at an emergent strategy that confluent systems employ to tune active transport, buffering inherent heterogeneities associated with natural cellular environment settings.
Cavitation, the nucleation of vapour in liquids, is ubiquitous in fluid dynamics, and is often implicated in a myriad of industrial and biomedical applications. Although extensively studied in ...isotropic liquids, corresponding investigations in anisotropic liquids are largely lacking. Here, by combining liquid crystal microfluidic experiments, nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations and theoretical arguments, we report flow-induced cavitation in an anisotropic fluid. The cavitation domain nucleates due to sudden pressure drop upon flow past a cylindrical obstacle within a microchannel. For an anisotropic fluid, the inception and growth of the cavitation domain ensued in the Stokes regime, while no cavitation was observed in isotropic liquids flowing under similar hydrodynamic parameters. Using simulations we identify a critical value of the Reynolds number for cavitation inception that scales inversely with the order parameter of the fluid. Strikingly, the critical Reynolds number for anisotropic fluids can be 50% lower than that of isotropic fluids.
Nematic and columnar phases of lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals (LCLCs) have been long studied for their fundamental and applied prospects in material science and medical diagnostics. LCLC phases ...represent different self-assembled states of disc-shaped molecules, held together by noncovalent interactions that lead to highly sensitive concentration and temperature dependent properties. Yet, microscale insights into confined LCLCs, specifically in the context of confinement geometry and surface properties, are lacking. Here, we report the emergence of time dependent textures in static disodium cromoglycate (DSCG) solutions, confined in PDMS-based microfluidic devices. We use a combination of soft lithography, surface characterization, and polarized optical imaging to generate and analyze the confinement-induced LCLC textures and demonstrate that over time, herringbone and spherulite textures emerge due to spontaneous nematic (N) to columnar M-phase transition, propagating from the LCLC-PDMS interface into the LCLC bulk. By varying the confinement geometry, anchoring conditions, and the initial DSCG concentration, we can systematically tune the temporal dynamics of the N- to M-phase transition and textural behavior of the confined LCLC. Overall, the time taken to change from nematic to the characteristic M-phase textures decreased as the confinement aspect ratio (width/depth) increased. For a given aspect ratio, the transition to the M-phase was generally faster in degenerate planar confinements, relative to the transition in homeotropic confinements. Since the static molecular states register the initial conditions for LC flows, the time dependent textures reported here suggest that the surface and confinement effects—even under static conditions—could be central in understanding the flow behavior of LCLCs and the associated transport properties of this versatile material.
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