Direct Observation of Nanotracer Transport in Swarming Bacteria during Antibiotic Adaptation

Microorganisms inevitably encounter environmental variations and thus need to develop necessary strategies to adjust the colonies for survival. Here, we use cooperating Serratia marcescens bacteria to reveal how the whole population responds to a gradually deteriorating habitat. When subjected to antibiotics with increasing doses, the swarming bacteria transform weak homogeneous turbulent flows to nematic jet flows with defects and vortices on a large scale, by which bacteria exploit these coherent flows to transfer material and/or information. We elucidate a complete view of detailed spatiotemporal transport behavior in such microscale active turbulence with single-nanoparticle tracking. The nanoparticles in these active flows are brought into the state with the up limit of superdiffusion by the bacterial collective response to the stronger antibiotic stimulation. Strikingly, we found that, under the strengthening stimulation from antibiotics, bacteria with only a small fraction of their community get elongated and facilitate the drastic turbulence transition and an enhanced superdiffusion. These findings imply a possible collective response mechanism against environmental variations.