{"id":918,"date":"2024-12-19T10:30:40","date_gmt":"2024-12-19T15:30:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.golive.clarku.edu\/faculty\/profiles\/alexander-petroff\/"},"modified":"2026-04-14T00:36:22","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T04:36:22","slug":"alexander-petroff","status":"publish","type":"cu_faculty","link":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/faculty\/profiles\/alexander-petroff\/","title":{"rendered":"Alexander Petroff"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span>Alexander Petroff is an experimental physicist who uses hydrodynamics and reaction diffusion equations to understand the organization, dynamics, and evolution of microbial systems in table-top experiments. 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The research focuses on Multicellular Magnetotactic Bacteria,which represent an intermediate between unicellular and multicellular life. These bacteria live exclusively in spherical aggregates composed of 10--60 cells, which quickly die when separated from the aggregate. Cells in an aggregate precipitate magnetic crystals, which align in a common direction. The cells work together to push the aggregate along magnetic field lines. As cells in an aggregate reproduce, the aggregate grows, elongates, and divides into two similarly sized aggregates. The physical mechanisms that underlie this remarkable cooperative behavior are poorly understood. It is not known how cells coordinate their growth, align their magnetic moments, and coordinate their motility. The project will investigate, through a combination of experiment and theory, how the interactions between cells as they grow and rotate their flagella, allow the cells to behave like a single multicellular organism. These types of interactions may have facilitated the evolution of complex life by allowing cells in a proto-multicellular group to cooperate before the evolution of shared chemical signaling pathways.&lt;\\\/p&gt;\\n&lt;p&gt;Intellectual Merit&lt;\\\/p&gt;\\n&lt;p&gt;Experimental studies of microbial dynamics are heavily biased towards a few model organisms. Approximately 99.9% of bacterial species, including Multicellular Magnetotactic Bacteria, cannot be grown in pure culture. Understanding the physical mechanisms that drive microbial evolution and ecological dynamics requires physicists to devise experiments to investigate uncultured bacteria. The study of Multicellular Magnetotactic Bacteria aggregates will elucidate the physical mechanisms underlying the evolution of multicellular life. These aggregates are unique in their ability to coordinate the growth and collective motion of their constituent cells. 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