What is Microbial Dormancy?

Life can be stressful. One way to deal with stress is to simply wait it out. Microbes do this by entering a state of reduced activity and increased resistance commonly called ‘dormancy’. But what is dormancy? Different scientific disciplines emphasize distinct traits and phenotypic ranges in defining dormancy for their microbial species and system-specific questions of interest. Here, we propose a unified definition of microbial dormancy, using a broad framework to place earlier discipline-specific definitions in a new context. We then discuss how this new definition and framework may improve our ability to investigate dormancy using multi-omics tools. Finally, we leverage our framework to discuss the diversity of genomic mechanisms for dormancy in an extreme environment that challenges easy definitions – the permafrost

Trajectory of an Anisotropic Particle Near a Light-Transmitting Optical Nanofiber

We present the general expressions force and torque on a dipolar particle of arbitrary linear birefringence. We use the derived equations to model the behavior of the anisotropic particle kyanite in the field of a light-transmitting optical nanofiber submerged in water. We examine the qualitative and quantitative features of the motion of the particle. We find that the steady-state orientation of the particle has one of its body-frame axes fixed perpendicular to the plane of the electric field while the other two rotate without stopping in the plane of the electric field. The rate at which the particle spins is nearly fixed but has small oscillations which represent less than 2% of its magnitude. This causes the force on the particle to oscillate, giving rise to vibration modes in the particle as it transverses its helical trajectory around the nanofiber