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Drying of bacterial suspensions is frequently encountered in a plethora of natural and engineering processes. However, the evaporation-driven mechanical instabilities of dense consolidating bacterial suspensions have not been explored heretofore. Here, we report the formation of two different crack patterns of drying suspensions of Escherichia coli ( E. coli ) with distinct motile behaviors. Circular cracks are observed for wild-type E. coli with active swimming, whereas spiral-like cracks form for immotile bacteria. Using the elastic fracture mechanics and the poroelastic theory, we show that the formation of the circular cracks is determined by the tensile nature of the radial drying stress once the cracks are initiated by the local order structure of bacteria due to their collective swimming. Our study demonstrates the link between the microscopic swimming behaviors of individual bacteria and the mechanical instabilities and macroscopic pattern formation of drying bacterial films. The results shed light on the dynamics of active matter in a drying process and provide useful information for understanding various biological processes associated with drying bacterial suspensions. 

Giant number fluctuations are often considered as a hallmark of the emergent nonequilibrium dynamics of active fluids. However, these anomalous density fluctuations have only been reported experimentally in two-dimensional dry active systems heretofore. Here, we investigate density fluctuations of bulk Escherichia coli suspensions, a paradigm of three-dimensional (3D) wet active fluids. Our experiments demonstrate the existence and quantify the scaling relation of giant number fluctuations in 3D bacterial suspensions. Surprisingly, the anomalous scaling persists at small scales in low-concentration suspensions well before the transition to active turbulence, reflecting the long-range nature of hydrodynamic interactions of 3D wet active fluids. To illustrate the origin of the density fluctuations, we measure the energy spectra of suspension flows and explore the density–energy coupling in both the steady and transient states of active turbulence. A scale-invariant density-independent correlation between density fluctuations and energy spectra is uncovered across a wide range of length scales. In addition, our experiments show that the energy spectra of bacterial turbulence exhibit the scaling of 3D active nematic fluids, challenging the common view of dense bacterial suspensions as active polar fluids. 

We experimentally study the emergence of collective bacterial swimming, a phenomenon often referred to as bacterial turbulence. A phase diagram of the flow of 3D Escherichia coli suspensions spanned by bacterial concentration, the swimming speed of bacteria, and the number fraction of active swimmers is systematically mapped, which shows quantitative agreement with kinetic theories and demonstrates the dominant role of hydrodynamic interactions in bacterial collective swimming. We trigger bacterial turbulence by suddenly increasing the swimming speed of light-powered bacteria and image the transition to the turbulence in real time. Our experiments identify two unusual kinetic pathways, i.e., the one-step transition with long incubation periods near the phase boundary and the two-step transition driven by long-wavelength instabilities deep inside the turbulent phase. Our study provides not only a quantitative verification of existing theories but also insights into interparticle interactions and transition kinetics of bacterial turbulence. 

As a paradigmatic model of active fluids, bacterial suspensions show intriguing rheological responses drastically different from their counterpart colloidal suspensions. Although the flow of bulk bacterial suspensions has been extensively studied, the rheology of bacterial suspensions under confinement has not been experimentally explored. Here, using a microfluidic viscometer, we systematically measure the rheology of dilute Escherichia coli suspensions under different degrees of confinement. Our study reveals a strong confinement effect: the viscosity of bacterial suspensions decreases substantially when the confinement scale is comparable or smaller than the run length of bacteria. Moreover, we also investigate the microscopic dynamics of bacterial suspensions including velocity profiles, bacterial density distributions, and single bacterial dynamics in shear flows. These measurements allow us to construct a simple heuristic model based on the boundary layer of upstream swimming bacteria near confining walls, which qualitatively explains our experimental observations. Our study sheds light on the influence of the boundary layer of collective bacterial motions on the flow of confined bacterial suspensions. Our results provide a benchmark for testing different rheological models of active fluids and are useful for understanding the transport of microorganisms in confined geometries.