Article Contents
Article Contents

Traveling wave solutions for a bacteria system with density-suppressed motility

• In 2011, Liu et. al. proposed a three-component reaction-diffusion system to model the spread of bacteria and its signaling molecules (AHL) in an expanding cell population. At high AHL levels the bacteria are immotile, but diffuse with a positive diffusion constant at low distributions of AHL. In 2012, Fu et. al. studied a reduced system without considering nutrition and made heuristic arguments about the existence of traveling wave solutions. In this paper we provide rigorous proofs of the existence of traveling wave solutions for the reduced system under some simple conditions of the model parameters.

Mathematics Subject Classification: 35K57, 35K65, 92C17.

 Citation:

• Figure 1.  Traveling wave solutions with parameter values up to four places after decimal: α = 2.4862, ρ−0 = 0.5130, γ = 0.1565, D = 0.3439. Wave speed is approximately c = 0.6430. Note that h(z) lies below 1 and is not monotone for z > 0.

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