Fluidic bacterial diodes rectify magnetotactic cell motility in porous environments

Nicolas Waisbord (), Amin Dehkharghani and Jeffrey S. Guasto ()
Additional contact information
Nicolas Waisbord: Tufts University
Amin Dehkharghani: Tufts University
Jeffrey S. Guasto: Tufts University

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract Directed motility enables swimming microbes to navigate their environment for resources via chemo-, photo-, and magneto-taxis. However, directed motility competes with fluid flow in porous microbial habitats, affecting biofilm formation and disease transmission. Despite this broad importance, a microscopic understanding of how directed motility impacts the transport of microswimmers in flows through constricted pores remains unknown. Through microfluidic experiments, we show that individual magnetotactic bacteria directed upstream through pores display three distinct regimes, whereby cells swim upstream, become trapped within a pore, or are advected downstream. These transport regimes are reminiscent of the electrical conductivity of a diode and are accurately predicted by a comprehensive Langevin model. The diode-like behavior persists at the pore scale in geometries of higher dimension, where disorder impacts conductivity at the sample scale by extending the trapping regime over a broader range of flow speeds. This work has implications for our understanding of the survival strategies of magnetotactic bacteria in sediments and for developing their use in drug delivery applications in vascular networks.

Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26235-6 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-021-26235-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-26235-6

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().