Boundary-Driven Emergent Spatiotemporal Order in Growing Microbial Colonies

We introduce a tractable stochastic spatial Moran model to explain experimentally-observed patterns of rod-shaped bacteria growing in rectangular microfluidic traps. Our model shows that spatial patterns can arise as a result of a tug-of-war between boundary effects and modulations of growth rate due to cell-cell interactions. Cells alignparallelto the long side of the trap when boundary effects dominate. However, when the magnitude of cell-cell interactions exceeds a critical value, cells align orthogonally to the trap’s long side. Our model is analytically tractable, and completely solvable under a mean-field approximation. This allows us to elucidate the mechanisms that govern the formation of population-level patterns. The model can be easily extended to examine various types of interactions that can shape the collective behavior in bacterial populations.