Ned S. Wingreen

Death and chemotaxis: Bacterial chemotaxis enables collective escape from phage predation

Bacteriophages (“phage”) are viruses that prey on bacteria in diverse environments, from biological tissues to soils. In many of these environments, bacterial hosts are constantly migrating, yet how bacterial migration is influenced by phage predation remains poorly understood. U...

The value of a prophage-borne defense system in phage–phage competition

Temperate phages that incorporate into their bacterial hosts’ genomes often encode defense systems that protect their hosts from superinfection by unrelated phages. Yet the evolutionary value of such defenses to the phage remains unclear. We present a minimal theoretical framewor...

Morphogenesis of bacterial colonies in liquid crystalline environments

Natural bacterial habitats are often complex fluids with viscoelastic and anisotropic responses to stress; for example, they can take the form of liquid crystals (LCs), with elongated microscopic constituents that collectively align while still retaining the ability to flow. Howe...