Pattern Formation Through Cooperative Self-Organization in Stressed Bacterial Colonies: A Complexity Perspective.

Stressed bacteria have developed cooperative strategies to cope with unfavorable growth conditions and to replicate. In this paper, we describe experimentally the effects of stressing bacteria using antibiotic stress, nutritional stress and substrate stress. We find that the cooperative communications between bacteria in the colony are manifested as fascinating complex spatial patterns. We then describe a modeling of this experimentally observed cooperative behavior of the bacteria colony from the perspective of complexity. The inter-bacterial interactions that give rise to the spatial patterns are viewed as an emergent phenomenon, with the interactions being modeled as a Prisoner's dilemma game. We obtain deterministic finite automata that model the interactions, and derive both, a context-free as well as a context-sensitive grammar describing the bacterial interactions and consequent evolution over discrete time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]