Related papers: Steering chiral swimmers along noisy helical paths
Collective cell migration in response to a chemical cue occurs in many biological processes such as morphogenesis and cancer metastasis. Clusters of migratory cells in these systems are capable of responding to gradients of less than 1%…
Bacteria can adjust their swimming behaviour in response to chemical variations, a phenomenon known as chemotaxis. This process is characterised by a drift velocity that depends non-linearly on the concentration of chemical species and its…
We introduce stochastic models of chemotaxis generalizing the deterministic Keller-Segel model. These models include fluctuations which are important in systems with small particle numbers or close to a critical point. Following Dean's…
Chemotaxis, the directional locomotion of cells towards a source of a chemical gradient, is an integral part of many biological processes - for example, bacteria motion, single-cell or multicellular organisms development, immune response,…
Microswimmers display an intriguing ability to navigate through fluids with spatially varying viscosity, a behavior known as viscotaxis, which plays a crucial role in guiding their motion. In this study, we reveal that the orientation…
Chemotaxis enables marine bacteria to increase encounters with phytoplankton cells by reducing their search times, provided that bacteria detect noisy chemical gradients around phytoplankton. Gradient detection depends on bacterial…
Swimming microorganisms often have to propel in complex, non-Newtonian fluids. We carry out experiments with self-propelling helical swimmers driven by an externally rotating magnetic field in shear-thinning, inelastic fluids. Similarly to…
Many chemotactic bacteria inhabit environments in which chemicals appear as localized pulses and evolve by processes such as diffusion and mixing. We show that, in such environments, physical limits on the accuracy of temporal gradient…
We study single cell E.coli chemotaxis in a spatio-temporally varying attractant environment. Modeling the attractant concentration in the form of a traveling sine wave, we measure in our simulations, the chemotactic drift velocity of the…
Adaptation of the chemotaxis sensory pathway of the bacterium Escherichia coli is integral for detecting chemicals over a wide range of background concentrations, ultimately allowing cells to swim towards sources of attractant and away from…
Kinetic-transport equations that take into account the intra-cellular pathways are now considered as the correct description of bacterial chemotaxis by run and tumble. Recent mathematical studies have shown their interest and their…
Swimming bacteria detect chemical gradients by performing temporal comparisons of recent measurements of chemical concentration. These comparisons are described quantitatively by the chemotactic response function, which we expect to…
A common feature of biological self-organization is how active agents communicate with each other or their environment via chemical signaling. Such communications, mediated by self-generated chemical gradients, have consequences for both…
Cells encounter a diverse array of physical and chemical signals as they navigate their natural surroundings. However, their response to the simultaneous presence of multiple cues remains elusive. Particularly, the impact of topography…
Many eukaryotic cells chemotax, sensing and following chemical gradients. However, experiments have shown that even under conditions when single cells cannot chemotax, small clusters may still follow a gradient. This behavior has been…
Many microorganisms take a chiral path while swimming in an ambient uid. In this paper, we study the combined behavior of two chiral swimmers using the well-known squirmer model taking into account chiral asymmetries. In contrast to the…
Biological microswimmers are known to navigate upstream of an external flow (positive rheotaxis) in trajectories ranging from linear, spiral to oscillatory. Such rheotaxis stems from the interplay between the motion and complex shapes of…
We discuss recent progress in the theoretical description of chemotaxis by coupling the diffusion equation of a chemical species to equations describing the motion of sensing microorganisms. In particular, we discuss models for…
We report the first experimental realization of a chiral artificial microswimmer exhibiting the helical motion. We found that a cholesteric liquid crystal droplet with a helical director field swims in a helical path driven by the Marangoni…
Chemotaxis, i.e. motion generated by chemical gradients, is a motility mode shared by many living species that has been developed by evolution to optimize certain biological processes such as foraging or immune response. In particular,…