Morphological Instabilities in a growing Yeast Colony: Experiment and Theory

TL;DR

This paper investigates the morphological instabilities in growing yeast colonies through experiments and a coupled diffusion model, revealing how nutrient conditions influence colony front stability.

Contribution

It introduces a combined experimental and theoretical approach to understand how nutrient diffusion and inhibitory metabolites cause morphological instabilities in yeast colonies.

Findings

Colony front morphology varies with agarose thickness.

Coupling growth to diffusive inhibitory metabolites explains front instability.

Qualitative agreement between model and experiments supports the proposed mechanism.

Abstract

We study the growth of colonies of the yeast Pichia membranaefaciens on agarose film. The growth conditions are controlled in a setup where nutrients are supplied through an agarose film suspended over a solution of nutrients. As the thickness of the agarose film is varied, the morphology of the front of the colony changes. The growth of the front is modeled by coupling it to a diffusive field of inhibitory metabolites. Qualitative agreement with experiments suggests that such a coupling is responsible for the observed instability of the front.