Oskar Hallatschek

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Microbes often colonize spatially-constrained habitats, such as pores in the skin or crypts in
the colon. The resulting micro-communities can be very stable and contribute to the long-term
function of our microbiomes. Due to a lack of dynamical observations, it is however unclear
how these communities and their ecological functions arise. By monitoring and modeling
microbial populations in microfluidic channels of systematically varied size, we find a rich
spectrum of scale-dependent dynamical patterns that are controlled by the competition
between density-dependent outflow and population growth. These results elucidate how
the injection of degrees of freedom, driven by cell proliferation, can drive a non-equilibrium
phase transition (different from MIPS) and suggest that the mechanics jammed cellular
packings can influence the evolutionary dynamics of dense microbial populations

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UC Berkeley
Online via zoom
Contact: Tobias Bollenbach