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Metachronal paddling is a swimming strategy in which an organism oscillates sets of adjacent limbs with a constant phase lag, propagating a metachronal wave through its limbs and propelling it forward. This limb coordination strategy is…
Fish schooling implies an awareness of the swimmers for their companions. In flow mediated environments, in addition to visual cues, pressure and shear sensors on the fish body are critical for providing quantitative information that…
Biological microswimmers such as bacteria and sperm cells often encounter complex biological fluid environments. Here we use the well-known squirmer microswimmer model to show the importance of the local fluid microstructure and…
Micron-sized self-propelled (active) particles can be considered as model systems for characterizing more complex biological organisms like swimming bacteria or motile cells. We produce asymmetric microswimmers by soft lithography and study…
Many applications of computational fluid dynamics require multiple simulations of a flow under different input conditions. In this paper, a numerical algorithm is developed to efficiently determine a set of such simulations in which the…
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…
Motivated by the aim of understanding the effect of media heterogeneity on the swimming dynamics of flagellated bacteria, we study the rotation and swimming of rigid helices in dilute suspensions experimentally and theoretically. We first…
One of simplest examples of navigation found in nature is run-and-tumble chemotaxis. Tumbles reorient cells randomly, and cells can drift toward attractants or away from repellents by biasing the frequency of these events. The post-tumble…
In this work we mimic the efficient propulsion mechanism of natural cilia by magnetically actuating thin films in a cyclic but non-reciprocating manner. By simultaneously solving the elasto-dynamic, magnetostatic and fluid mechanics…
Many motile biological cells navigate along concentration gradients of signaling molecules: This chemotaxis guides for instance sperm cells from marine invertebrates, which have to find egg cells in the ocean. While chemotaxis has been…
The identification of cellular objectives is one of the central topics in the research of microbial metabolic networks. In particular, the information about a cellular objective is needed in flux balance analysis which is a commonly used…
Both natural and artificial small-scale swimmers may often self-propel in environments subject to complex geometrical constraints. While most past theoretical work on low-Reynolds number locomotion addressed idealised geometrical…
Membrane filtration is a vital industrial process, with applications including air purification and blood filtration. In this paper, we study the optimal design for a concertinaed filtration membrane composed of angled porous membranes and…
Cilia and flagella are self-actuated microtubule-based structures that are present on many cell surfaces, ranging from the outer surface of single-cell organisms to the internal epithelial surfaces in larger animals. A fast and robust…
Wet-lab experiments, in which the dynamics within living cells are observed, are usually costly and time consuming. This is particularly true if single-cell measurements are obtained using experimental techniques such as flow-cytometry or…
We investigate exploration patterns of a microswimmer, modeled as an active Brownian particle, searching for a target region located in a well of an energy landscape and separated from the initial position of the particle by high barriers.…
Some types of bacteria use rotating helical flagella to swim. The motion of such organisms takes place in the regime of low Reynolds numbers where viscous effects dominate and where the dynamics is governed by hydrodynamic interactions.…
During development, highly ordered structures emerge as cells collectively coordinate with each other. While recent advances have clarified how individual cells process and respond to external signals, understanding collective cellular…
Swimming bacteria create long-range velocity fields that stir a large volume of fluid and move around passive particles dispersed in the fluid. Recent experiments and simulations have shown that long-time mean-squared displacement of…
Nature has always inspired scientists and engineers to understand the underlying mechanism leading to optimal design in bio-inspired dynamics. This study presents a computational framework for optimizing undulatory swimming profiles using a…