Fig. 3

a, b Dispersal of motile (yellow) and non-motile (blue) bacterial strains on the bacterial “trail” device. Box-whisker charts show the density of bacterial cells in each of the sampling wells at the end of the corresponding dispersal duration: 4 h (top panels) or 24 h (bottom panels). Each box represents the data of four independent replicates. The data points are overlaid with the corresponding box-whisker chart. The devices were filled with two different liquid solutions: Nutrient Broth (NB) (a) and PBS buffer (b). For plotting on the log scale, we assigned a cell density of 1 CFU/ml to samples where no cells could be detected. c Growth curves of the motile (yellow) and non-motile (blue) strains in the NB medium (circles) and in PBS (diamonds). The plot is based on eight independent replicates for each bacterial strain and medium combination