Events Detail

Speaker:
Prof. Dr. Stefan Karpitschka, University of Konstanz

This event is part of an event series „Seminar Series Summer Semester 2023“.

Collective behaviour of gliding filamentous cyanobacteria

They're small, green and long ago conquered our planet – filamentous cyanobacteria exist since over two billion years and once dominated our biosphere, generating the oxygen we breath. Today, they dwell in all climate zones, contributing majorly to the global fixation of atmospheric carbon dioxide while their blooms pose ecological and economical threats. Individual filaments are only microns wide but up to a few millimeters long, highly flexible, and exhibit gliding motility, which provides the basis for intriguing collective behavior. This collective behavior is believed to be central to their evolutionary success, but neither the motility mechanism, nor the cascade leading from the responsive behavior of individuals to the adaptive self-organization of entire colonies is understood. I will present our recent experiments that quantify the micromechanics of cyanobacterial gliding, and how mechanical instabilities and responsive behavior lead to long-range self-organization in cyanobacterial colonies.
 

Stefan Karpitschka studied physics at the University of Bayreuth. He finished his PhD on “Dynamics of Liquid Interfaces with Compositional Gradients” at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces and the University of Potsdam in 2012. After postdoctoral research stays at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, LAM Research AG, Universiteit Twente and Stanford University, he became the leader of the Research Group „Interfaces of complex fluids“ at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (Göttingen) in 2017. In 2023, Stefan Karpitschka became professor for experimental physics at the University of Konstanz.

Join the Talk on Zoom