Related papers: Self-assisted Amoeboid Navigation in Complex Envir…
The kinesin superfamily of motor proteins is a major driver of anterograde transport of vesicles and organelles within eukaryotic cells via microtubules. Numerous studies have elucidated the step-size, velocities, forces, and navigation…
To survive in ever-changing environments, living organisms need to continuously combine the ongoing external inputs they receive, representing present conditions, with their dynamical internal state, which includes influences of past…
Cells encounter a diverse array of physical and chemical signals as they navigate their natural surroundings. However, their response to the simultaneous presence of multiple cues remains elusive. Particularly, the impact of topography…
As motivated by studies of cellular motility driven by spatiotemporal chemotactic gradients in microdevices, we develop a framework for constructing approximate analytical solutions for the location, speed and cellular densities for cell…
The ability of many living systems to actively self-propel underlies critical biomedical, environmental, and industrial processes. While such active transport is well-studied in uniform settings, environmental complexities such as geometric…
The proper functioning of the nervous system depends critically on the intricate network of synaptic connections that are generated during the system development. During the network formation, the growth cones migrate through the embryonic…
Autonomous navigation in complex environments is a crucial task in time-sensitive scenarios such as disaster response or search and rescue. However, complex environments pose significant challenges for autonomous platforms to navigate due…
We explore how different types and uses of memory can aid spatial navigation in changing uncertain environments. In the simple foraging task we study, every day, our agent has to find its way from its home, through barriers, to food.…
Several micro-organisms, such as bacteria, algae, or spermatozoa, use flagella or cilia to swim in a fluid, while many other micro-organisms instead use ample shape deformation, described as amoeboid, to propel themselves by either crawling…
Microorganisms often perform chemotaxis, (i.e., sensing and moving toward a region with a higher concentration of an attractive chemical) by changing the rate of tumbling for random walk. We studied several models with internal adaptive…
Directed collective cell migration is central in morphogenesis, wound healing and cancer progression1,2. Although it is well-accepted that the molecular anisotropy of the micro-environment guides this migration3,4, its impact on the pattern…
To navigate a space, the brain makes an internal representation of the environment using different cells such as place cells, grid cells, head direction cells, border cells, and speed cells. All these cells, along with sensory inputs,…
A large number of biological systems - from bacteria to sheep - can be described as ensembles of self-propelled agents (active particles) with a complex internal dynamic that controls the agent's behavior: resting, moving slow, moving fast,…
Constructing physical models of living cells and tissues is an extremely challenging task because of the high complexities of both intra- and intercellular processes. In addition, the force that a single cell generates vanishes in total due…
We propose a physical framework for ant navigation of chemical trails. For this, we use controlled experiments in which individuals follow narrow pheromone trails, for which ants display oscillatory motion, as previously reported in the…
Chemotaxis is the response of a particle to a gradient in the chemical composition of the environment. While it was originally observed for biological organisms, it is of great interest in the context of synthetic active particles such as…
Navigation is an essential ability for mobile agents to be completely autonomous and able to perform complex actions. However, the problem of navigation for agents with limited (or no) perception of the world, or devoid of a fully defined…
Directed fibroblast migration is central to highly proliferative processes in regenerative medicine and developmental biology, such as wound healing and embryogenesis. However, the mechanisms by which single fibroblasts affect each other's…
Inputs to signaling pathways can have complex statistics that depend on the environment and on the behavioral response to previous stimuli. Such behavioral feedback is particularly important in navigation. Successful navigation relies on…
Equipping active colloidal robots with intelligence such that they can efficiently navigate in unknown complex environments could dramatically impact their use in emerging applications like precision surgery and targeted drug delivery. Here…