Filamentous self-organization
We study the flexible and elastic cyanobacteria filaments as a model organism to understand the underlying physics in filamentous self-organisation in nature. We focus on the single filament dynamics and filament-filament interactions in larger assemblies. The ongoing projects and results are as following:
Right-handed chirality plays an important role in the self-organization of filamentous bacteria into compact aggregates. Rotation around the long axis of a flexible bacterial filament leads to clockwise bending of the filament due to partial friction on the filament. The bending can lead to the formation of bacterial spheres and to the entanglement of bacterial filaments, which then results in the formation of compact, yet dynamic, structures (manuscript under preparation).
The self-organization of cyanobacteria filaments in a microfluidic channel suggests that there is filamentous self-assembly across scales. The aster formation and merging that we observe in cyanobacteria filaments (filaments of 4 μm in diameter) is very similar to the aster dynamics of microtubules (20 nm in diameter). We study the physics behind the aster formation in cyanobacteria and are developing a model that can support the idea of existing a universal filamentous self-assembly physics in nature in gliding filaments (work under progress).
