Related papers: A bacterial ratchet motor
The design of artificial microswimmers is often inspired by the strategies of natural microorganisms. Many of these creatures exploit the fact that elasticity breaks the time-reversal symmetry of motion at low Reynolds numbers, but this…
Bacterial contamination of biological conducts, catheters or water resources is a major threat to public health and can be amplified by the ability of bacteria to swim upstream. The mechanisms of this rheotaxis, the reorientation with…
Many fascinating properties of biological active matter crucially depend on the capacity of constituting entities to perform directed motion, e.g., molecular motors transporting vesicles inside cells or bacteria searching for food. While…
We describe a new kind of self-propelling motion of bacteria based on the cooperative action of rotating flagella on the surface of bacteria. Describing the ensemble of rotating flagella in the framework of the hydrodynamics with spin the…
Bacteria can spontaneously develop collective motions by aligning their motions in dense systems. Here, we show that bacteria can also respond collectively to an alternating electrical field and form dynamic clusters oscillating at the same…
How systems are endowed with migration capacity is a fascinating question with implications ranging from the design of novel active systems to the control of microbial populations. Bacteria, which can be found in a variety of environments,…
The diffusion of active microscopic organisms in complex environments plays an important role in a wide range of biological phenomena from cell colony growth to single organism transport. Here, we investigate theoretically and…
In this paper we present a hydrodynamic approach to describe the motion of migrating bacteria as a special class of self-propelled systems. Analytical and numerical calculations has been performed to study the behavior of our model in the…
Activity and autonomous motion are fundamental in living and engineering systems. This has stimulated the new field of active matter in recent years, which focuses on the physical aspects of propulsion mechanisms, and on motility-induced…
Autonomous active Brownian ratchets rectify active Brownian particle motion solely by means of a spatially modulated but stationary activity, without external forces. We argue that such ratcheting requires at least a two-dimensional…
Bacterial cellulose biofilms are complex networks of strong interwoven nanofibers that control transport and protect bacterial colonies in the film. Design of diverse applications of bacterial cellulose films also relies on understanding…
Magnetotactic bacteria (MTB) are endowed with an exquisite orientation mechanism allowing them to swim along the geomagnetic field lines. This mechanism consists of a chain of bio-synthesized magnetic nano-crystals that endow MTB with a…
Nematodes have evolved to swim in highly viscous environments. Artificial mechanisms that mimic the locomotory functions of nematodes can be efficient viscous pumps. We experimentally simulate the motion of the head segment of…
The swimming properties of an E. coli-type model bacterium are investigated by mesoscale hy- drodynamic simulations, combining molecular dynamics simulations of the bacterium with the multiparticle particle collision dynamics method for the…
There are many examples of driven and active matter systems containing particles that exhibit circular motion with different chiralities, such as swimming bacteria near surfaces or certain types of self-driven colloidal particles. Circular…
Biological and artificial microswimmers often self-propel in external flows of vortical nature; relevant examples include algae in small-scale ocean eddies, spermatozoa in uterine peristaltic flows and bacteria in microfluidic devices. A…
We use molecular dynamics simulations to investigate the displacement of a simple butterfly-like molecular motor inside nanopores of various radii filled with a viscous medium. The medium is modeled with a versatile potential that may be…
Escherichia coli has long been used as a model organism due to the extensive experimental characterization of its pathways and molecular components. Take chemotaxis as an example, which allows bacteria to sense and swim in response to…
The demonstrations of micro-robotic systems in minimally invasive medicine include an individual or a swarm of microswimmer of various origin, artificial or biohybrid, often with an external computer-controlled electromagnetic field. There…
Various microorganisms and some mammalian cells are able to swim in viscous fluids by performing nonreciprocal body deformations, such as rotating attached flagella or by distorting their entire body. In order to perform chemotaxis, i.e. to…