Viscous Influence

The complex fluid habitats favoured by bacteria have the characteristics (such as alignment of particles) of liquid crystal between a solid and a liquid, but this is often overlooked – in lab experiments bacteria are more usually examined in simple solutions. In liquid crystal here bacteria are revealed as they divide to line up in chains which then buckle, confined and shaped by the stresses of the viscous medium. Here E.coli are seen proliferating first in a medium with a liquid crystal concentration that dwindles over time, then in a medium steadily pumped with liquid crystal

Read the published research article here

Written by Lindsey Goff

Lindsey Goff

Editor-in-Chief

Formerly immunologist for Cancer Research UK, Lindsey has since moved into the field of scientific publishing. She looks after all BPoD editorial matters.

• Video from work by Sebastian Gonzalez La Corte & Thomas G. J. Chandler, and colleagues
• Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ; Department of Mathematics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), August 2026