Related papers: The head leads the body: a curvature-based kinemat…
Brain research has been driven by enquiry for principles of brain structure organization and its control mechanisms. The neuronal wiring map of C. elegans, the only complete connectome available till date, presents an incredible opportunity…
Undulatory locomotion, a gait in which thrust is produced in the opposite direction of a traveling wave of body bending, is a common mode of propulsion used by animals in fluids, on land, and even within sand. As such it has been an…
In the gonad of C. elegans worms, germ cells form the outer lining of the central tube, the rachis, which carries a cytoplasmic flow.
We investigate the escape dynamics of oligochaeta {\it Lumbriculus variegatus} by confining them to a quasi-2D circular chamber with a narrow exit passage. The worms move by performing undulatory and peristaltic strokes and use their head…
Morphogenesis emerges from dynamic feedback among geometry, mechanics, and chemistry; however, disentangling these contributions in living systems remains challenging. Here, we focus on the interplay between geometry and mechanics by…
Control is essential to the functioning of any neural system. Indeed, under healthy conditions the brain must be able to continuously maintain a tight functional control between the system's inputs and outputs. One may therefore hypothesise…
Although commonly associated with limbless animals like snakes and fish, multi-legged organisms like centipedes also utilize undulatory locomotion. Whether these undulations are actively reinforced or resisted by the axial musculature…
Active fluids, such as cytoskeletal filaments, bacterial colonies and epithelial cell layers, exhibit distinctive orientational coherence, often characterized by nematic order and topological defects. By contrast, little is known about…
Deep learning segmentation and fluorescence imaging techniques allow the cellular morphology of living embryos to be constructed spatiotemporally. These development processes involve numerous molecules distributed at the subcellular scale,…
Cellular membranes exhibit a large variety of shapes, strongly coupled to their function. Many biological processes involve dynamic reshaping of membranes, usually mediated by proteins. This interaction works both ways: while proteins…
Coordinated cellular movements are key processes in tissue morphogenesis. Using a cell-based modeling approach we study the dynamics of epithelial layers lining surfaces with constant and varying curvature. We demonstrate that extrinsic…
We investigate the dynamics of \textbf{\textit{Lumbriculus variegatus}} in water-saturated sediment beds to understand limbless locomotion in the benthic zone found at the bottom of lakes and oceans. These slender aquatic worms are observed…
Cell motility in higher organisms (eukaryotes) is crucial to biological functions ranging from wound healing to immune response, and also implicated in diseases such as cancer. For cells crawling on hard surfaces, significant insights into…
We study the spatiotemporal patterns that emerge when an active nematic film is topologically constraint. These topological constraints allow to control the non-equilibrium dynamics of the active system. We consider ellipsoidal shapes for…
When the motion of a motile cell is observed closely, it appears erratic, and yet the combination of nonequilibrium forces and surfaces can produce striking examples of organization in microbial systems. While most of our current…
Computer-aided analysis of biological microscopy data has seen a massive improvement with the utilization of general-purpose deep learning techniques. Yet, in microscopy studies of multi-organism systems, the problem of collision and…
Biological cells and many living organisms are mostly made of liquids and therefore, by analogy with liquid drops, they should exhibit a range of fundamental nonlinear phenomena such as the onset of standing surface waves. Here, we test…
Nutation is an oscillatory movement that plants display during their development. Despite its ubiquity among plants movements, the relation between the observed movement and the underlying biological mechanisms remains unclear. Here we show…
Rectilinear crawling locomotion is a primitive and common mode of locomotion in slender, soft-bodied animals. It requires coordinated contractions that propagate along a body that interacts frictionally with its environment. We propose a…
In the fluid dynamics video, we present a microfluidic device to measure the propulsive power of nematodes. The device consists of a tapered conduit filled with aqueous solution. The conduit is subjected to a DC electric field with the…