Harnessing Escherichia coli motility to engineer bacterial Voronoi patterns
- 1University of Lausanne
Abstract
Cell motility drives spatial pattern formation across diverse biological systems. Here, we engineer Escherichia coli motility in semi-solid agar to control Voronoi patterns in two and three dimensions, partitioning space into regions closest to their respective inoculation seeds. Consistent with our reaction-diffusion model, we observed that collisions between expansion fronts generate either biomass depletion (''gaps'') or accumulation (''anti-gaps''), governed by the relative diffusion rates of bacteria and nutrients. By engineering strains with distinct expansion rates and tuneable motility, and by integrating these experimental data into a dynamic Voronoi model, we achieved precise control over pattern geometry. This enabled the generation of gaps with varying widths, curved boundaries, asymmetric structures, seedless regions, and complex composite patterns. Together, these findings establish bacterial Voronoi patterns as a programmable platform for engineering multicellular spatial organization, with potential applications in synthetic biology and materials science.
Related
- The chemorepellent effect of metformin limits bacterial penetration into mammalian mucus by altering bacterial motility
- A Specific Ancestral Sequence Reconstruction of Flagellin Can Drive Motility in Salmonella enterica but not Escherichia coli
- Bacterial expression of human small GTPases induces stochastic predatory responses and motility interference in Physarum polycephalum
- Bacterial strategies for surviving antibiotics during urinary tract infection: could uropathogenic Escherichia coli be persisters?
- Integrating bacterial and viral genomic information enhances and extends the machine learning predictions of bacteriophage activity against pathogenic Escherichia coli
BibTeX
@misc{park2026harnessing,
title = {{Harnessing Escherichia coli motility to engineer bacterial Voronoi patterns}},
author = {J. H. Park and E. Boni and G. Hollo and Y. Schaerli},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = aug,
doi = {10.64898/2026.08.31.748246},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.31.748246v1},
note = {CC BY-NC},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Harnessing Escherichia coli motility to engineer bacterial Voronoi patterns
AU - J. H. Park
AU - E. Boni
AU - G. Hollo
AU - Y. Schaerli
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/08/31
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.08.31.748246
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.31.748246v1
AB - Cell motility drives spatial pattern formation across diverse biological systems. Here, we engineer Escherichia coli motility in semi-solid agar to control Voronoi patterns in two and three dimensions, partitioning space into regions closest to their respective inoculation seeds. Consistent with our reaction-diffusion model, we observed that collisions between expansion fronts generate either biomass depletion (''gaps'') or accumulation (''anti-gaps''), governed by the relative diffusion rates of bacteria and nutrients. By engineering strains with distinct expansion rates and tuneable motility, and by integrating these experimental data into a dynamic Voronoi model, we achieved precise control over pattern geometry. This enabled the generation of gaps with varying widths, curved boundaries, asymmetric structures, seedless regions, and complex composite patterns. Together, these findings establish bacterial Voronoi patterns as a programmable platform for engineering multicellular spatial organization, with potential applications in synthetic biology and materials science.
ER -