event
Thursday 25 May 2023: Modelling biofilms using thin-film approaches
John Ward - Loughborough University
Harrison 170 14:30-15:30
Bacterial biofilms are slimy colonies of bacterial cells that are ubiquitous in nature on solid-fluid interfaces. During the early stages the biofilm typically consists of a thin, dense pad of cells that will eventually develop into a complex heterogenous colonies, the latter being resistent to many anti-microbial treatments. In this talk we focus on the early stages, exploiting the homogenous structure and treating biofilm as a highly viscous fluid with the ability to generate mass through cell growth. Two cases are presented, depending on the presence or not of motile cells in the media in which the biofilm is growing. In each of the cases, the reduced models based on thin-film assumptions will be discussed, together with results from numerical computation and asymptotic analysis.
