Reaction-diffusion modelling of bacterial colony patterns

Abstract It is well known from experiments that bacterial species Bacillus subtilis exhibit various colony patterns. These are essentially classified into five types in the morphological diagram, depending on the substrate softness and nutrient concentration. (A) diffusion-limited aggregation-like; (B) Eden-like; (C) concentric ring-like; (D) disk-like; and (E) dense branching morphology-like. There arises the naive question of whether the diversity of colony patterns observed in experiments is caused by different effects or governed by the same underlying principles. Our research has led us to propose reaction–diffusion models to describe the morphological diversity of colony patterns except for Eden-like ones.