Bacteria as living patchy colloids: Phenotypic heterogeneity in surface adhesion

Abstract

This dataset contains data corresponding to the figures in the main text of the manuscript "Bacteria as living patchy colloids: Phenotypic heterogeneity in surface adhesion" (Science Advances, 4, 4, eaao1170, 2018). Data is from experiments of bacteria on a glass surface. From movies recorded in time, we follow many individual cells in time and quantify their dynamics. Our results show that even in a clonal population (genetically identical cells), there are differences between individual cells in adhesion properties. The observations can be explained with a model, where cells have various numbers of adhesive patches. Cells with zero patches never adhere, cells with one patch adhere weakly and cells with multiple patches can adhere strongly. More details and background information on the data can be found in the manuscript and its figure captions and SI, and/or in the readme.txt file attached to this dataset.