Related papers: C. elegans in Complex Media
The physical mechanism of microbial motion near solid-liquid interfaces is crucial for understanding various biological phenomena and developing ecological applications. However, limited works have been conducted on the swimming behavior of…
Transport phenomena in out-of-equilibrium systems is immensely important in a myriad of applications in biology, engineering and physics. Complex environments, such as the cytoplasm or porous media, can substantially affect the transport…
Colloidal rods immersed in a thermotropic liquid-crystalline solvent are at the basis of so-called hybrid liquid crystals which are characterized by tunable nematic fluidity with symmetries ranging from conventional uniaxial nematic or…
A nonlinear viscoelastic theory of nematodynamic type is developed for nematic liquid crystalline (LC) semi-flexible polymers. A measure of transient elastic strain due to the change in length of macromolecular strands under stress, and the…
We exploit flow propagation on the directed neuronal network of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to reveal dynamically relevant features of its connectome. We find flow-based groupings of neurons at different levels of granularity, which…
Recent progresses in single particle tracking have shown evidences of non-Gaussian distribution of displacements in living cells, both near the cellular membrane and inside the cytoskeleton. A similar behavior has also been observed in…
Using molecular dynamics simulation, we investigate transport properties of a classical two-dimensional electron system confined in a microchannel with a narrow constriction. As a function of the confinement strength of the constriction,…
Deviations of molecular shapes from spherical symmetry may give rise to a variety of novel phenomena, including their dynamic behavior. It has recently been predicted [Mazza \textit{et al}. Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{105}, 227802 (2010)] that…
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…
The locomotion of microorganisms and spermatozoa in complex viscoelastic fluids is of critical importance in many biological processes such as fertilization, infection, and biofilm formation. Depending on their propulsion mechanisms,…
Using numerical simulations, we characterized the behavior of an elastic membrane immersed in an active fluid. Our findings reveal a nontrivial folding and re-expansion of the membrane that is controlled by the interplay of its resistance…
While many living biological media combine both viscous and elastic properties, most theoretical studies employ either purely fluid- or solid-like descriptions. We here use a unified framework for active films on substrates capable of…
There is a recent surge of interest in the behavior of active particles that can at the same time align their direction of movement and synchronize their oscillations, known as swarmalators. While theoretical and numerical models of such…
Microorganism motility often takes place within complex, viscoelastic fluid environments, e.g., sperm in cervicovaginal mucus and bacteria in biofilms. In such complex fluids, strains and stresses generated by the microorganism are stored…
This fluid dynamics video demonstrates the capabilities of an experimental setup to visualize organisms burrowing in granular substrates. The setup consists of a tank filled with 1mm soda-lime glass beads, backlit by halogen lights. The…
We report an experimental investigation of the spontaneous motion of liquid droplets on soft gels with a crosslinking gradient. By systematically adjusting the spatial difference in crosslinking density, we observed that millimeter-sized…
How systems are endowed with migration capacity is a fascinating question with implications ranging from the design of novel active systems to the control of microbial populations. Bacteria, which can be found in a variety of environments,…
Charged (nano)particles confined in electrodynamic traps can evolve into strongly correlated Coulomb systems which are the subject of current investigation. Exciting physical phenomena associated to Coulomb systems are reported such as…
We exploit the reduced space of C. elegans postures to develop a novel tracking algorithm which captures both simple shapes and also self-occluding coils, an important, yet unexplored, component of worm behavior. We apply our algorithm to…
Nematode species are well-known for their invariant cell lineage pattern during development. Combining knowledge about the fate specification induced by asymmetric division and the anti-correlation between cell cycle length and cell volume…