Related papers: A bacterial ratchet motor
Insects like dragonflies and cicadas possess nanoprotusions on their wings that rupture bacterial membranes upon contact, inspiring synthetic antibacterial surfaces mimicking this phenomenon. Designing such biomimetic surfaces requires…
Mechanisms of locomotion in microscopic systems are of great interest not only for technological applications, but also for the sake of understanding, and potentially harnessing, processes far from thermal equilibrium. Down-scaling is a…
Artificial nanowalkers are inspired by biomolecular counterparts from living cells, but remain far from comparable to the latter in design principles. The walkers reported to date mostly rely on chemical mechanisms to gain a direction; they…
{\it E. coli} bacteria swim in straight runs interrupted by sudden reorientation events called tumbles. The resulting random walks give rise to density fluctuations that can be derived analytically in the limit of non interacting particles…
Propagating spiral waves have been discovered in various chemical, biological and physical systems. Spiral waves in multicellular organisms are often associated with essential living functions. Although certain eukaryotic microorganisms…
Active systems of self-propelled agents, e.g., birds, fish, and bacteria, can organize their collective motion into myriad autonomous behaviors. Ubiquitous in nature and across length scales, such phenomena are also amenable to artificial…
To model the morphogenesis of rod-shaped bacterial micro-colony, several individual-based models have been proposed in the biophysical literature. When studying the shape of micro-colonies, most models present interaction forces such as…
How motile bacteria move near a surface is a problem of fundamental biophysical interest and is key to the emergence of several phenomena of biological, ecological and medical relevance, including biofilm formation. Solid boundaries can…
Colonies of bacteria grown on thin agar plate exhibit fractal patterns as a result of adaptation to their environments. The bacterial colony pattern formation is regulated crucially by chemotaxis, the movement of cells along a chemical…
Swimmers and self-propelled particles are physical models for the collective behaviour and motility of a wide variety of living systems, such as bacteria colonies, bird flocks and fish schools. Such artificial active materials are amenable…
Self-propulsion plays a crucial role in biological processes and nanorobotics, enabling small systems to move autonomously in noisy environments. Here, we theoretically demonstrate that a bound skyrmion-skyrmion pair in a synthetic…
Using molecular dynamics simulations, we show that an asymmetrically shaped nanoparticle in dilute solution possesses a spontaneously curved trajectory within finite time interval, instead of the generally expected random walk. This…
Self-propelled chemically powered synthetic micron and nano-scale motors are being intensively studied because of the wide range of potential applications that exploit their directed motion. This paper considers even smaller…
Active particles such as swimming bacteria or self-propelled colloids are known to spontaneously organize into fascinating large-scale dynamic structures. The emergence of these collective states from the motility pattern of the individual…
Active matter comprises self-driven units, such as bacteria and synthetic microswimmers, that can spontaneously form complex patterns and assemble into functional microdevices. These processes are possible thanks to the out-of-equilibrium…
In growing active matter systems, a large collection of engineered or living autonomous units metabolize free energy and create order at different length scales as they proliferate and migrate collectively. One such example is bacterial…
In this article we highlight chemotaxis (cellular movement) as a rich source of potential engineering applications and computational models, highlighting current research and possible future work. We first give a brief description of the…
Respiration in bacteria involves a sequence of energetically-coupled electron and proton transfers creating an electrochemical gradient of protons (a proton-motive force) across the inner bacterial membrane. With a simple kinetic model we…
Active matter consists of units that generate mechanical work by consuming energy. Examples include living systems, such as assemblies of bacteria and biological tissues, biopolymers driven by molecular motors, and suspensions of synthetic…
Many bacteria live in natural and clinical environments with abundant macromolecular polymers. Macromolecular fluids commonly display viscoelasticity and non-Newtonian rheological behavior; it is unclear how these complex-fluid properties…