Interplay of surface interaction and magnetic torque in single-cell motion of magnetotactic bacteria in microfluidic confinement
- Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Germany
- CEA Cadarache, France
- University of Göttingen, Germany
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
Article and author information
Author details
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.
Reviewing Editor
- Raymond E Goldstein, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Version history
- Preprint posted: March 27, 2021 (view preprint)
- Received: June 24, 2021
- Accepted: July 18, 2022
- Accepted Manuscript published: July 19, 2022 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: August 9, 2022 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2022, Codutti et al.
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.
Metrics
-
- 1,136
- views
-
- 291
- downloads
-
- 8
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Interplay of surface interaction and magnetic torque in single-cell motion of magnetotactic bacteria in microfluidic confinement
eLife 11:e71527.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.71527
Further reading
-
- Microbiology and Infectious Disease
- Physics of Living Systems
Natural environments of living organisms are often dynamic and multifactorial, with multiple parameters fluctuating over time. To better understand how cells respond to dynamically interacting factors, we quantified the effects of dual fluctuations of osmotic stress and glucose deprivation on yeast cells using microfluidics and time-lapse microscopy. Strikingly, we observed that cell proliferation, survival, and signaling depend on the phasing of the two periodic stresses. Cells divided faster, survived longer, and showed decreased transcriptional response when fluctuations of hyperosmotic stress and glucose deprivation occurred in phase than when the two stresses occurred alternatively. Therefore, glucose availability regulates yeast responses to dynamic osmotic stress, showcasing the key role of metabolic fluctuations in cellular responses to dynamic stress. We also found that mutants with impaired osmotic stress response were better adapted to alternating stresses than wild-type cells, showing that genetic mechanisms of adaptation to a persistent stress factor can be detrimental under dynamically interacting conditions.
-
- Physics of Living Systems
We formulate a hydrodynamic theory of confluent epithelia: i.e. monolayers of epithelial cells adhering to each other without gaps. Taking advantage of recent progresses toward establishing a general hydrodynamic theory of p-atic liquid crystals, we demonstrate that collectively migrating epithelia feature both nematic (i.e. p = 2) and hexatic (i.e. p = 6) orders, with the former being dominant at large and the latter at small length scales. Such a remarkable multiscale liquid crystal order leaves a distinct signature in the system’s structure factor, which exhibits two different power-law scaling regimes, reflecting both the hexagonal geometry of small cells clusters and the uniaxial structure of the global cellular flow. We support these analytical predictions with two different cell-resolved models of epithelia – i.e. the self-propelled Voronoi model and the multiphase field model – and highlight how momentum dissipation and noise influence the range of fluctuations at small length scales, thereby affecting the degree of cooperativity between cells. Our construction provides a theoretical framework to conceptualize the recent observation of multiscale order in layers of Madin–Darby canine kidney cells and pave the way for further theoretical developments.
