“Life in a Tight Spot: How Bacteria Move in Heterogeneous Media”

Bacterial motility is central to processes in agriculture, the environment, and medicine. While motility is typically studied in homogeneous environments, many bacterial habitats—e.g., soils, sediments, and biological gels/tissues—are heterogeneous porous media. Here, through studies of E. coli in transparent 3D porous media, we demonstrate that confinement in a heterogeneous medium fundamentally alters motility. In particular, we show how the paradigm of run-and-tumble motility is dramatically altered by pore-scale confinement, both for cells performing undirected motion and those performing chemotaxis, directed motion in response to a chemical stimulus. Our porous media also enable precisely structured multi-cellular communities to be 3D printed. Using this capability, we show how confinement-dependent chemotaxis enables populations to stabilize large-scale perturbations in their overall morphology. Together, our work thus reveals new principles to predict and control the behavior of bacteria, and active matter in general, in heterogeneous environments.