Postdoc: Modelling bacterial transport strategies in real-life environments (LAI, Marseille-Luminy)

id="offer-description" class="ecl-u-type-heading-2 ecl-u-mt-none ecl-u-mb-l">Offer Description Understanding bacterial transport strategies in real-life environments: an optimal-control perspective on well-controlled experiments with model bacteria & environment. Supervisor: Jean-François Rupprecht, Laboratoire Adhésion et Inflammation (LAI), Marseille-Luminy (France), and TBMTM consortium ( https://www.cite-des-energies.fr/biam/projets/bacteries-magnetotactique… ). Abstract Magnetotactic bacteria (MTB) navigate along Earth’s magnetic field by combining magnetic alignment with tactic responses to chemical and oxygen cues. In nature, however, these bacteria do not swim in homogeneous fluids: they live in sediments, porous gels and confined microstructures where chemical landscapes are strongly shaped by local heterogeneities. This post-doctoral project aims to understand how MTB exploit such heterogeneous environments to achieve long-distance navigation. The central hypothesis is that a weak large-scale chemical gradient, too shallow to be directly detected at the scale of an individual bacterium, can be reshaped by the porous structure of sediments into local chemical signals strong enough to guide bacterial motion. The project will investigate two complementary mechanisms:. Objective 1 — Random sequence of strong chemotactic steps. The sediment converts a smooth macroscopic gradient into a random sequence of large local steps in chemotactic signal. Although the global gradie