Related papers: Chemotactic Maneuverability of Sperm
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…
A common feature of biological self-organization is how active agents communicate with each other or their environment via chemical signaling. Such communications, mediated by self-generated chemical gradients, have consequences for both…
The existence of travelling waves for a model of concentration waves of bacteria is investigated. The model consists in a kinetic equation for the biased motion of cells following a run-and-tumble process, coupled with two…
Many chemotactic bacteria inhabit environments in which chemicals appear as localized pulses and evolve by processes such as diffusion and mixing. We show that, in such environments, physical limits on the accuracy of temporal gradient…
Amoeboid motion is a dynamic mode of cell motility essential for processes such as the immune response and wound healing. This review examines recent developments in the mathematical and computational modeling of amoeboid crawling, focusing…
The motility of a fish keratocyte on a flat substrate exhibits two distinct regimes: the non-migrating and the migrating one. In both configurations the shape is fixed in time and, when the cell is moving, the velocity is constant in…
In chemotaxis, cells are modulating their migration patterns in response to concentration gradients of a guiding substance. Immune cells are believed to use such chemotactic sensing for remotely detecting and homing in on pathogens.…
Interactions between swimming cells and surfaces are essential to many microbiological processes, from bacterial biofilm formation to human fertilization. However, in spite of their fundamental importance, relatively little is known about…
We consider a simple thermodynamically consistent model that captures the self-organized chemomechanical coupling resulting from the interplay between autocatalytically reacting surfactants, the Marangoni effect and wetting dynamics. An…
Living microorganisms are capable of a tactic response to external stimuli by swimming towards or away from the stimulus source; they do so by adapting their tactic signal transduction pathways to the environment. Their self-motility thus…
Multicellular chemotaxis can occur via individually chemotaxing cells that are mechanically coupled. Alternatively, it can emerge collectively, from cells chemotaxing differently in a group than they would individually. Here we consider…
Unsteadiness occurs in the low Reynolds number swimmers' motion while they start from rest or escape from a predator or attack prey. In this paper, we study an unsteady chiral swimmer's behavior, with a prescribed surface slip velocity, in…
Flagellated bacteria are hydrodynamically attracted to rigid walls, yet past work shows a 'hovering' state where they swim stably at a finite height above surfaces. We use numerics and theory to reveal the physical origin of hovering.…
Swimming eukaryotic microorganisms such as spermatozoa, algae and ciliates self-propel in viscous fluids using travelling wave-like deformations of slender appendages called flagella. Waves are predominant because Purcell's scallop theorem…
Cells are constantly exposed to diverse stimuli-chemical, mechanical, or electrical-that guide their movement. In physiological conditions, these signals often overlap, as seen during infections, where neutrophils and dendritic cells…
In a low Reynolds number fluid environment that microswimmers encounter, back-and-forth motion cannot lead to net displacement. In mammalian sperm, the mechanical wave propagating along their single flagellum breaks the cancellation between…
Active fluids made of powered suspended particles have unique abilities to self-generate flow and density structures. How such dynamics can be triggered and leveraged by external cues is a key question of both biological and applied…
Bacterial chemotaxis is one of the most extensively studied adaptive responses in cells. Many bacteria are able to bias their apparently random motion to produce a drift in the direction of the increasing chemoattractant concentration. It…
Bacterial motility, and in particular repulsion or attraction towards specific chemicals, has been a subject of investigation for over 100 years, resulting in detailed understanding of bacterial chemotaxis and the corresponding sensory…
We experimentally studied the locomotion of the nematode C. elegans in both fluidic and granular media. In this fluid dynamics video, we show the motility gaits of the nematode in these two environments. The motility of the nematode C.…