Related papers: C. elegans in Complex Media
There is increasing evidence that mammalian cells not only crawl on substrates but can also swim in fluids. To elucidate the mechanisms of the onset of motility of cells in suspension, a model which couples actin and myosin kinetics to…
Deep phenotyping is an emerging conceptual paradigm and experimental approach that seeks to measure many aspects of phenotypes and link them to understand the underlying biology. Successful deep phenotyping has mostly been applied in…
Liquid crystals have attracted enormous interest because of the variety of their phases and richness of their application. The interplay of general physical symmetries and specific molecular features generates a myriad of different…
The classical walking behaviors of a single atom in an amplitude-modulated standing wave lattice beyond the internal dynamics are investigated. Based on a simple effective model, we identify a diversity of dynamic regimes of atomic motion…
Understanding flow and transport of bacteria in porous media is crucial to technologies such as bioremediation, biomineralization or enhanced oil recovery. While physicochemical bacteria filtration is well-documented, recent studies showed…
We introduce a generic, purely mechanical model for environment sensitive motion of mammalian cells that is applicable to chemotaxis, haptotaxis, and durotaxis as modes of motility. It is able to theoretically explain all relevant…
The systematic errors due to the practical implementation of the Contact Dynamics method for simulation of dense granular media are examined. It is shown that, using the usual iterative solver to simulate a chain of rigid particles,…
Diverse processes--e.g. bioremediation, biofertilization, and microbial drug delivery--rely on bacterial migration in disordered, three-dimensional (3D) porous media. However, how pore-scale confinement alters bacterial motility is unknown…
In order to keep their cohesiveness during locomotion gregarious animals must make collective decisions. Many species boast complex societies with multiple levels of communities. A common case is when two dominant levels exist, one…
Microorganisms often encounter anisotropy, for example in mucus and biofilms. We study how anisotropy and elasticity of the ambient fluid affects the speed of a swimming microorganism with a prescribed stroke. Motivated by recent…
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…
Movements of molecular motors on cytoskeletal filaments are described by directed walks on a line. Detachment from this line is allowed to occur with a small probability. Motion in the surrounding fluid is described by symmetric random…
In many situations bacteria move in complex environments, as for example in soils, oceans or the human gut-track microbiome. In these natural environments, carrier fluids such as mucus or reproductive fluids show complex structure…
Gels in soft-matter systems are an important nonergodic state of matter. We study a colloid-polymer mixture which is quenched by increasing the polymer concentration, from a fluid to a gel. Using confocal microscopy, we study both the…
Extending the famous Model B for the time evolution of a liquid mixture, we derive an approximate expression for the mobility matrix that couples the different mixture components. This approach is based on a single component fluid with…
Over the past decade the study of fluidic droplets bouncing and skipping (or ``walking'') on a vibrating fluid bath has gone from an interesting experiment to a vibrant research field. The field exhibits challenging fluids problems,…
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…
The growing interest in active nematics and the emerging evidence of the relevance of topological defects in biology asks for reliable data analysis tools to identify, classify and track such defects in simulation and microscopy data. We…
We derive a mathematical model for the motion of several insulating rigid bodies through an electrically conducting fluid. Starting from a universal model describing this phenomenon in generality, we elaborate (simplifying) physical…
Motivated by the motion of nematode sperm cells, we present a model for the motion of an adhesive gel on a solid substrate. The gel polymerizes at the leading edge and depolymerizes at the rear. The motion results from a competition between…