期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2003
卷号：100
期号：24
页码：13910-13915
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1935975100
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：The environmental topology of complex structures is used by Escherichia coli to create traveling waves of high cell density, a prelude to quorum sensing. When cells are grown to a moderate density within a confining microenvironment, these traveling waves of cell density allow the cells to find and collapse into confining topologies, which are unstable to population fluctuations above a critical threshold. This was first observed in mazes designed to mimic complex environments, then more clearly in a simpler geometry consisting of a large open area surrounding a square (250 x 250 {micro}m) with a narrow opening of 10-30 {micro}m. Our results thus show that under nutrient-deprived conditions bacteria search out each other in a collective manner and that the bacteria can dynamically confine themselves to highly enclosed spaces.
