Klebsiella pneumoniae flocculation dynamics

The bacterial pathogen Klebsiella pneumoniae is a cause of community- and hospital-acquired lung, urinary tract and blood stream infections. It is a common contaminant of indwelling catheters and it is theorized in that context that systemic infection follows shedding of aggregates off of surface-adherent biofilm colonies. In an effort to better understand bacterial proliferation in the host bloodstream, we develop a PDE model for the flocculation dynamics of Klebsiella pneumoniae in suspension. Existence and uniqueness results are provided, as well as a brief description of the numerical approximation scheme. We generate artificial data and illustrate the requirements to accurately identify proliferation, aggregation, and fragmentation of flocs in the experimental domain of interest.