Facultat de Física

Departament de Física de la Matèria Condensada

Bacterial biofilms as minimal models of living matter

Prof. Jordi Garcia Ojalvo

Department of Medicine and Life Sciences Universitat Pompeu Fabra

The active (and reactive) properties of cells make living tissue a state of matter that is very challenging to investigate using the tools of physics. It is thus necessary to identify an instance of living matter that is both simple enough to handle and monitor, and yet sufficiently complex in its behavior to exemplify the richness of biological systems. We propose that bacterial populations fulfill these requirements. While bacteria are usually considered the ultimate single-cell organism, many bacterial species form dense populations with complex spatiotemporal behavior. These systems can be considered both proto-multicellular organisms and minimal examples of living tissue. In this talk I will review our work with these systems over more than a decade, aimed at understanding the mechanisms underlying the dynamics of this type of living matter in both time and space.

Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo obtained his PhD in statistical physics at the University of Barcelona in 1995. He did postdoctoral work at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta in 1996, working on laser dynamics, and at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1998 as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, studying noise effects in excitable media and neuronal systems. In 2003 he was IGERT Visiting Professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, at which time he began working in the field of systems biology. In 2008 he became Full Professor at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, where he had been teaching applied physics since 1991. He is Visiting Research Associate in Biology at the California Institute of Technology since 2006, and joined the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) as Full Professor in October 2012, where he leads the laboratory of Dynamical Systems Biology at the Department of Medicine and Life Sciences.