Microbes in flow
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Updated: Apr 15, 2026

Window on a Microworld: Simple Microfluidic Systems for Studying Microbial Transport in Porous Media
Published on: May 3, 2010
Roberto Rusconi1, Roman Stocker1
1Ralph M. Parsons Laboratory, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Abstract:
Microbes often live in moving fluids. Despite the multitude of implications that flow has on microbial ecology and environmental microbiology, only recently have experimental tools and conceptual frameworks from fluid physics been applied systematically to further our knowledge of the behavior of microbes in flow. This nascent research field, which truly straddles biology and physics, has already produced important contributions to our understanding of the physical interaction between microbes and flow, both in bulk fluid and close to surfaces, at the same time revealing the richness and complexity of the resulting dynamics.
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