Biofilm reorganization: Back to the theoretical drawing board

Biofilm reorganization: Back to the theoretical drawing board: "The results of our analysis were really surprising," said study co-author Oleg Igoshin, assistant professor in bioengineering at Rice. "Our results didn't support either of the major competing theories people have come up with. Those theories were each predicated on the idea that as the bacterial mounds were forming and reorganizing, the individual bacterium were drawn toward one or another of them by some sort of chemical signal.
"That doesn't appear to be the case at all," Igoshin said...
"We found that size mattered most," Igoshin said. "Not size in relation to neighbors, which is something people had previously thought might matter, but size of the aggregate itself. We found that if we answered one question -- is the size of an aggregate beyond a certain threshold -- then we could accurately predict whether the aggregate would survive with 90 percent accuracy."