Modelling and simulation of biological systems

 

Funded by a Marie-Curie reintegration grant

Research Summary

 

Swarming

   

 

·         Amit Rabani, Gil Ariel and Avraham Be'er, Collective motion of spherical bacteria, PLoS ONE 8, e83760 [pdf] [SI].

·         Gil Ariel, Adi Shklarsh, Oren Kalisman, Colin Ingham and Eshel Ben-Jacob, From organized internal traffic to collective navigation of bacterial swarms, New J. Phys. 15, 125019 (2013). [pdf] [SI] [movies]

·         Adi Shklarsh, Gil Ariel, Elad Schneidman and Eshel Ben-Jacob, Smart Swarms of Bacteria-Inspired Agents with Performance Adaptable Interactions, PLOS Comput. Biol. 7: 1002177 (2011) [manuscript - pdf]

 

Dynamics of bacterial colonies

 

 

 

An example experiment in which two seeds of bacterial colonies grow side by side for 10 days. The two colonies sense each other and growth in the direction of the neighbouring colony stops. The dynamics of the colony is modelled using a system of free-boundary reaction-diffusion equations. The system is solved numerically using level-set methods.

Movie: two bacterial colonies growing in a 9cm Perti dish.

 

·         Avraham Be'er, Gil Ariel, Oren Kalisman, Yael Helman, Alexandra Sirota-Madim H.P. Zhang, E.-L. Florin, Shelly M. Payne, Eshel Ben-Jacob and Harry L. Swinney, Lethal protein produced in response to competition between sibling bacterial colonies, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 107: 6258-6263 (2010) [manuscript - pdf] [supporting material - pdf]

 

 

 

Dynamics of locust swarms

 

This is a new project that involves the dynamics of locust swarms. We analyse the multiscale nature of a swarm of locusts in a circular arena and suggest mathematical models for their dynamics.

click picture to see movie

 

Tracking data for PLoS ONE 2014 paper