Surface sensing, motility appendages, and hydrodynamics in bacterial interactions with surfaces

Bacterial biofilms are integrated communities of cells that adhere to surfaces and are fundamental to the ecology and biology of bacteria. The accommodation of a free-swimming cell to a solid surface is more complex than simply modulation of cell adhesion. We investigate the interplay between motility appendages, molecular motors, hydrodynamics, and exopolysaccharide production near the surface environment using state of the art tools from different fields that are not usually combined, including theoretical physics, community tracking with single cell resolution, genetics, and microbiology. We show that surface sensing, multi-generational signaling, and downstream motility consequences can be understood within a Turing-inspired stochastic model, and that bacteria can have a surprisingly long memory of >10 hrs.