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Self-propelling bacteria are a dream of nano-technology. These unicellular organisms are not just capable of living and reproducing, but they can swim very efficiently, sense the environment and look for food, all packaged in a body…
A packed community of exponentially proliferating microbes will spread in size exponentially. However, due to nutrient depletion, mechanical constraints, or other limitations, exponential proliferation is not indefinite, and the spreading…
Malware propagation poses a growing threat to networked systems such as computer networks and cyber-physical systems. Current approaches to defending against malware propagation are based on patching or filtering susceptible nodes at a…
Flagellated bacteria, such as Escherichia coli, perform directed motion in gradients of concentration of attractants and repellents in a process called chemotaxis. The E. coli chemotaxis signaling pathway is a model for signal transduction,…
In intracellular transports, motor proteins transport macromolecules as cargos to desired locations by moving on biopolymers such as microtubules. Recent experiments suggest that cargos that can associate motor proteins during their…
Contact between particles and motile cells underpins a wide variety of biological processes, from nutrient capture and ligand binding, to grazing, viral infection and cell-cell communication. The window of opportunity for these interactions…
In cells and in vitro assays the number of motor proteins involved in biological transport processes is far from being unlimited. The cytoskeletal binding sites are in contact with the same finite reservoir of motors (either the cytosol or…
Peritrichously-flagellated bacteria, such as Escherichia coli, self-propel in fluids by using specialised motors to rotate multiple helical filaments. The rotation of each motor is transmitted to a short flexible segment called the hook…
How motile bacteria move near a surface is a problem of fundamental biophysical interest and is key to the emergence of several phenomena of biological, ecological and medical relevance, including biofilm formation. Solid boundaries can…
Despite being of vital importance to the immune system, the mechanism by which cells engulf relatively large solid particles during phagocytosis is still poorly understood. From movies of neutrophil phagocytosis of polystyrene beads, we…
We propose a novel stochastic model for the spread of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria in a population, together with an efficient algorithm for fitting such a model to sample data. We introduce an individual-based model for the epidemic,…
In living organisms, proteins and peptides are often under the influence of mechanical forces, especially in confined spaces such as membrane channels, ribosome exit tunnel, or proteasome gate. Due to the directional nature of proteins as…
DNA is an attractive candidate for data storage. Its millennial durability and nanometer scale offer exceptional data density and longevity. Its relevance to medical applications also drives advances in DNA-related biotechnology. To protect…
Culturing cells confined in microscale geometries has been reported in many studies this last decade, in particular following the development of microfluidic-based applications and lab-on-a-chip devices. Such studies usually examine growth…
All cells must sustain ionic motive forces (IMFs) -- the electrochemical gradients of permeant ions, together with the membrane potential they produce -- to regulate intracellular pH, drive secondary transport, and power ATP synthesis.…
Simulations of tethered cells in viscous sub-layers are frequently performed using the Stokes drag force, but without taking into account contributions from surface corrections, lift forces, buoyancy, the Basset force, the cells finite…
We perform molecular dynamics simulations to compress binary hard spheres into jammed packings as a function of the compression rate $R$, size ratio $\alpha$, and number fraction $x_S$ of small particles to determine the connection between…
Tethered Particle Motion (TPM) is a single molecule technique, which consists in tracking the motion of a nano-particle (NP) immersed in a fluid and tethered to a glass surface by a DNA molecule. The present work addresses the question of…
Membrane budding and wrapping of particles, such as viruses and nano-particles, play a key role in intracellular transport and have been studied for a variety of biological and soft matter systems. We study nano-particle wrapping by…
HIV is a retrovirus that attacks the human immune system and can lead to death without proper treatment. In collaboration with the WHO and Wits University, we study how to improve the efficiency of HIV testing with the goal of eventual…