On a walk, my colleague noticed that the morphology of algae growth on trees could vary significantly even on the same tree. To understand what might cause these type of variations, we decided to study a model bacterial system.

We noticed that varying the nutrition and the stiffness of the substrate that the bacteria was grown on significantly affected the morphology of the bacterial growth. Alongside this experimental work, we built a simple reaction-diffusion model and showed that the behavior could be qualitatively replicated in simulation.