The fascinating patterns of collective motion created by autonomously driven particles have
fuelled active-matter research for over two decades. So far, theoretical active-matter …

Bacterial growth presents many beautiful phenomena that pose new theoretical challenges
to statistical physicists, and are also amenable to laboratory experimentation. This review …

Surface-attached bacterial biofilms are self-replicating active liquid crystals and the
dominant form of bacterial life on Earth,,–. In conventional liquid crystals and solid-state …

The soil bacterium Myxococcus xanthus lives in densely packed groups that form dynamic
three-dimensional patterns in response to environmental changes, such as droplet-like …

Bacteria commonly live attached to surfaces in dense collectives containing billions of cells.
While it is known that motility allows these groups to expand en masse into new territory …

How a single bacterium becomes a colony of many thousand cells is important in
biomedicine and food safety. Much is known about the molecular and genetic bases of this …

Dense suspensions of swimming bacteria are known to exhibit collective behaviour arising
from the interplay of steric and hydrodynamic interactions. Unconfined suspensions exhibit …

Many bacterial species colonize surfaces and form dense 3D structures, known as biofilms,
which are highly tolerant to antibiotics and constitute one of the major forms of bacterial …

Biofilms are surface-associated bacterial communities that are crucial in nature and during
infection. Despite extensive work to identify biofilm components and to discover how they …

Biofilms are aggregates of bacterial cells surrounded by an extracellular matrix. Much
progress has been made in studying biofilm growth on solid substrates; however, little is …