Related papers: Motility of small nematodes in disordered wet gran…
We investigate the locomotion of thin, living T. tubifex worms, which display active polymerlike behavior, within quasi-2D arrays of cylindrical pillars, examining varying spatial arrangements and densities. These active worms spread in…
Dissipative environments are ubiquitous in nature, from microscopic swimmers in low-Reynolds-number fluids to macroscopic animals in frictional media. In this study, motivated by various behaviours of {\it Caenorhabditis elegans} during…
Motility is a fundamental survival strategy of bacteria to navigate porous environments. Swimming cells thrive in quiescent wetlands and sediments at the bottom of the marine water column, where they mediate many essential biogeochemical…
Organisms move through the world by changing their shape, and here we explore the mapping from shape space to movements in the nematode C. elegans as it crawls on a planar agar surface. We characterize the statistics of the trajectories…
Many microorganisms live and evolve in complex fluids. Examples include mammalian spermatozoa in cervical mucus, worms (e.g., \textit{C. elegans}) in wet soil, and bacteria (e.g., \textit{H. pylori}) in our stomach lining. Due to the…
It is often desirable to enhance the motility of active nano- or microscale swimmers such as, e.g., self-propelled Janus particles as agents of chemical reactions or weak sperm cells for better chances of successful fertilization. Here we…
The motility of microorganisms is influenced greatly by their hydrodynamic interactions with the fluidic environment they inhabit. We show by direct experimental observation of the bi-flagellated alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii that fluid…
Limbless locomotors, from microscopic worms to macroscopic snakes, traverse complex, heterogeneous natural environments typically using undulatory body wave propagation. Theoretical and robophysical models typically emphasize body…
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…
It has recently been reported that bacteria, such as E.coli and P. putida, perform distinct modes of motion when placed in porous media as compared to dilute regions or free space. This has led us to suggest an efficient strategy for active…
We study the characteristics of fluid-fluid displacement in simple mixed-wet porous micromodels numerically using a dynamic pore network model. The porous micromodel consists of distinct water-wet and oil-wet regions, whose fractions are…
Swimming cells and microorganisms must often move though complex fluids that contain an immersed microstructure such as polymer molecules, or filaments. In many important biological processes, such as mammalian reproduction and bacterial…
Undulatory swimming is a widespread propulsion strategy adopted by many small-scale organisms including various single-cell eukaryotes and nematodes. In this work, we report a comprehensive study of undulatory locomotion of a finite…
Particles moving along curved trajectories will diffuse if the curvature fluctuates sufficiently in either magnitude or orientation. We consider particles moving at a constant speed with either a fixed or with a Gaussian distributed…
It has been known for some time that some microorganisms can swim faster in high-viscosity gel-forming polymer solutions. These gel-like media come to mimic highly viscous heterogeneous environment that these microorganisms encounter…
How do the same mechanisms that faithfully regenerate complex developmental programs in spite of environmental and genetic perturbations also permit responsiveness to environmental signals, adaptation, and genetic evolution? Using the…
Understanding physical rules underlying collective motions requires perturbation of controllable parameters in self-propelled particles. However, controlling parameters in animals is generally not easy, which makes collective behaviours of…
Many organisms live in confined fluidic environments such as the thin liquid layers on the skin of host organisms or in partially- saturated soil. We investigate the collective behaviour of nematodes in a thin liquid layer, which was first…
The natural habitats of microorganisms in the human microbiome and ocean and soil ecosystems are full of colloids and macromolecules, which impart non-Newtonian flow properties drastically affecting the locomotion of swimming…
Many small organisms self-propel in viscous fluids using travelling wave-like deformation of their bodies or appendages. Examples include small nematodes moving through soil using whole-body undulations or spermatozoa swimming through mucus…