Interplay of surface interaction and magnetic torque in single-cell motion of magnetotactic bacteria in microfluidic confinement

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Abstract

Swimming microorganisms often experience complex environments in their natural habitat. The same is true for microswimmers in envisioned biomedical applications. The simple aqueous conditions typically studied in the lab differ strongly from those found in these environments and often exclude the effects of small volume confinement or the influence that external fields have on their motion. In this work, we investigate magnetically steerable microswimmers, specifically magnetotactic bacteria, in strong spatial confinement and under the influence of an external magnetic field. We trap single cells in micrometer-sized microfluidic chambers and track and analyze their motion, which shows a variety of different trajectories, depending on the chamber size and the strength of the magnetic field. Combining these experimental observations with simulations using a variant of an active Brownian particle model, we explain the variety of trajectories by the interplay between the wall interactions and the magnetic torque. We also analyze the pronounced cell-to-cell heterogeneity, which makes single-cell tracking essential for an understanding of the motility patterns. In this way, our work establishes a basis for the analysis and prediction of microswimmer motility in more complex environments.

Data availability

All data (experimental and simulatedl trajectories) as well as analysis and simulation code has been deposited at Edmond, https://doi.org/10.17617/3.7b

The following data sets were generated

(2021) Single-cell characterization of magnetotactic bacteria motion in high confinement
Edmond.

https://doi.org/10.17617/3.7b

Article and author information

Author details

Agnese Codutti

Biomaterials Department, Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Potsdam, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Mohammad A Charsooghi

Biomaterials Department, Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Potsdam, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Elisa Cerdá-Doñate

Biomaterials Department, Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Potsdam, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Hubert M Taïeb

Biomaterials Department, Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Potsdam, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-7530-8988
Tom Robinson

Theory and Bio‐systems Department, Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Potsdam, Germany

For correspondence
tom.robinson@mpikg.mpg.de

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-5236-7179
Damien Faivre

BIAM, CEA Cadarache, Saint Paul lez Durance, France

For correspondence
damien.faivre@cea.fr

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-6191-3389
Stefan Klumpp

Institute for the Dynamics of Complex Systems, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

For correspondence
stefan.klumpp@phys.uni-goettingen.de

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-0584-2146

Funding

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (KL 818/2-2)

Stefan Klumpp

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (FA 835/7-2)

Damien Faivre

BMBF and Max Planck Society (MaxSynBio)

Tom Robinson

IMPRS on Multiscale Biosystems (n/a)

Agnese Codutti

IMPRS on Multiscale Biosystems (n/a)

Elisa Cerdá-Doñate

IMPRS on Multisclale Biosystems (n/a)

Hubert M Taïeb

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.