Living bacteria rheology: population growth, aggregation patterns and cooperative behaviour under different shear flows

The activity of growing living bacteria was investigated using real-time and in situ rheology -- in stationary and oscillatory shear. Two different strains of the human pathogen Staphylococcus aureus -- strain COL and its isogenic cell wall autolysis mutant -- were considered in this work. For low bacteria density, strain COL forms small clusters, while the mutant, presenting deficient cell separation, forms irregular larger aggregates. In the early stages of growth, when subjected to a stationary shear, the viscosity of both strains increases with the population of cells. As the bacteria reach the exponential phase of growth, the viscosity of the two strains follow different and rich behaviours, with no counterpart in the optical density or in the population's colony forming units measurements. While the viscosity of strain COL keeps increasing during the exponential phase and returns close to its initial value for the late phase of growth, where the population stabilizes, the viscosity of the mutant strain decreases steeply, still in the exponential phase, remains constant for some time and increases again, reaching a constant plateau at a maximum value for the late phase of growth. These complex viscoelastic behaviours, which were observed to be shear stress dependent, are a consequence of two coupled effects: the cell density continuous increase and its changing interacting properties. The viscous and elastic moduli of strain COL, obtained with oscillatory shear, exhibit power-law behaviours whose exponent are dependent on the bacteria growth stage. The viscous and elastic moduli of the mutant have complex behaviours, emerging from the different relaxation times that are associated with the large molecules of the medium and the self-organized structures of bacteria. These behaviours reflect nevertheless the bacteria growth stage.Comment: 9 pages, 10 figure

Alzheimer's disease research: a network science approach

A limit number of studies have applied bibliometric visualisation to explore the network structure of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). This paper uses CiteSpace, Carrot and VOSviewer to analyse and visualise the intellectual structure of AD, characterizing, quantitatively and qualitatively, the global scientific outputs, and identifying their trends. The 9,753 articles obtained from the science citation index expanded database (SCI-E), from Web-of-Science, were analysed. The publication data is analysed computationally to identify publication patterns, a rate of growth of publications, types of authorship collaboration, the most productive authors, countries, institutions, journals, keywords, the citation and keyword patterns, the hotspots and the areas of research on the AD. The paper presents a detailed analytical mapping of AD research and charts the progress of discipline with various useful parameters. The authors expect to contribute to the theory, supplying researchers with new tools and enabling practitioners to improve their knowledge about the AD evolution and trends.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Nano-terracing on polycrystalline palladium induced via simple heat treatment

This paper concerns formation of terraces on polycrystalline Pd, via heat treatments followed by quenching with gas jets. The driving force for terrace formation is the crystallographic anisotropy of the surface energy. Information is presented regarding the surface topography of the terraces and of the grain boundary regions. Typically, the step heights are about 50 nm and the widths of the faces between them are around 1 μm. It is shown that a measure of control can be exercised over the structures produced, although they are determined by a complex interplay of related effects.This research was supported by the EPSRC (EP/E025862/1) and the European Research Council (grant no. 240446)