Related papers: Hydrodynamic phase-locking of swimming microorgani…
Unicellular microscopic organisms living in aqueous environments outnumber all other creatures on Earth. A large proportion of them are able to self-propel in fluids with a vast diversity of swimming gaits and motility patterns. In this…
The propulsion of mammalian spermatozoa relies on the spontaneous periodic oscillation of their flagella. These oscillations are driven internally by the coordinated action of ATP-powered dynein motors that exert sliding forces between…
Fish often travel in highly organized schools. One of the most quoted functions of these configurations is energy savings. Here, we verified the hypothesis and explored the mechanism through series of experiments on "schooling" robotic…
The motion of microorganisms in their natural habitat is strongly influenced by their propulsion mechanisms, geometrical constraints, and random fluctuations. Here, we study numerically the first-passage-time (FPT) statistics of…
We investigate the dynamics of model microswimmers under confinement, in cylindrical geometries, by means of three dimensional direct numerical calculations with fully resolved hydrodynamics. Such swimmers are known to show collective…
Flagella are hair-like appendages attached to microorganisms that allow the organisms to traverse their fluid environment. The algae Volvox are spherical swimmers with thousands of individual flagella on their surface and their coordination…
Many eukaryotic cells use the active waving motion of flexible flagella to self-propel in viscous fluids. However, the criteria governing the selection of particular flagellar waveforms among all possible shapes has proved elusive so far.…
The basic phenomenology of experimentally observed synchronization (i.e., a stochastic phase locking) of identical, beating flagella of a biflagellate alga is known to be captured well by a minimal model describing the dynamics of coupled,…
Microorganism motility often takes place within complex, viscoelastic fluid environments, e.g., sperm in cervicovaginal mucus and bacteria in biofilms. In such complex fluids, strains and stresses generated by the microorganism are stored…
Cells and other soft particles are often forced to flow in confined geometries in both laboratory and natural environments, where the elastic deformation induces an additional drag and pressure drop across the particle. In contrast with…
Bacteria predate plants and animals by billions of years. Today, they are the world's smallest cells yet they represent the bulk of the world's biomass, and the main reservoir of nutrients for higher organisms. Most bacteria can move on…
We present a novel Monte Carlo simulation of the phase separation dynamics of a model fluid membrane. Such a phase segregation induces shape changes of the membrane and results in local `budding' under favourable conditions. We present a…
The hydrodynamic interactions among bacterial cell bodies, flagella, and surrounding boundaries are essential for understanding bacterial motility in complex environments. In this study, we demonstrate that each slender flagellum can be…
We present the first time-resolved measurements of the oscillatory velocity field induced by swimming unicellular microorganisms. Confinement of the green alga C. reinhardtii in stabilized thin liquid films allows simultaneous tracking of…
Micro-organisms can be classified into three different types according to their size. We study the efficiency of the swimming of micro-organism in two dimensional fluid as a device for helping the explanation of this hierarchy in the size.…
Microorganisms often encounter strong confinement and complex hydrodynamic flows while navigating their habitats. Combining finite-element methods and stochastic simulations, we study the interplay of active transport and heterogeneous…
A recently developed theory of stochastic swimming is used to study the notion of coherence in active systems that couple via hydrodynamic interactions. It is shown that correlations between various modes of deformation in stochastic…
Active swimmers are ubiquitous in nature, found in many diverse biological systems ranging from bacteria to vertebrate fish. Of particular importance are sperm cells which are swimmers that are crucial for the survival of many species…
We study how hydrodynamic interactions affect the collective behaviour of active particles suspended in a fluid at high concentrations, with particular attention to lubrication forces which appear when the particles are very close to one…
Water is vital for life, and without it biomolecules and cells cannot maintain their structures and functions. The remarkable properties of water originate from its ability to form hydrogen-bonding networks and dynamics, which the…