Related papers: Kinematics of the most efficient cilium
Many applications of computational fluid dynamics require multiple simulations of a flow under different input conditions. In this paper, a numerical algorithm is developed to efficiently determine a set of such simulations in which the…
Cellular appendages conferring motility, such as flagella or cilia, are known to synchronise their periodic beats. The origin of synchronisation is a combination of long-range hydrodynamic interactions with physical mechanisms allowing the…
Cellular biology abound with filaments interacting through fluids, from intracellular microtubules, to rotating flagella and beating cilia. While previous work has demonstrated the complexity of capturing nonlocal hydrodynamic interactions…
Motivated by the swimming of sperm in the non-Newtonian fluids of the female mammalian reproductive tract, we examine the swimming of filaments in the nonlinear viscoelastic Upper Convected Maxwell model. We obtain the swimming velocity and…
The transmission of kinetic energy through chains of inelastically colliding spheres is investigated for the case of constant coefficient of restitution \epsilon=const and impact-velocity dependent coefficient \epsilon(v) for viscoelastic…
The ability of a cell to communicate with its environment is essential for key cellular functions like replication, metabolism, or cell fate decisions. The involved molecular mechanisms are highly dynamic and difficult to capture…
The mechanical properties of actin filaments are essential to their biological functions. Here, we introduce a highly coarse-grained model of actin filaments that preserves helicity and chirality while enabling mesoscale simulations. The…
Most bacteria swim through fluids by rotating helical flagella which can take one of twelve distinct polymorphic shapes. The most common helical waveform is the "normal" form, used during forward swimming runs. To shed light on the…
Fluid-structure interactions between active and passive components are important for many biological systems to function. A particular example is chromatin in the cell nucleus, where ATP-powered processes drive coherent motions of the…
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…
The deformation of thin rods in a viscous liquid is central to the mechanics of motility in cells ranging from \textit{Escherichia coli} to sperm. Here we use experiments and theory to study the shape transition of a flexible rod rotating…
Left-right axis specification establishes embryonic laterality through asymmetric signaling cascades originating at the cellular scale. We previously reported the presence of a directionality bias in confined pairs of endothelial (and…
The mechanics of animal cells is strongly determined by stress fibers, which are contractile filament bundles that form dynamically in response to extracellular cues. Stress fibers allow the cell to adapt its mechanics to environmental…
The energetic optimization problem, e.g., searching for the optimal switch- ing protocol of certain system parameters to minimize the input work, has been extensively studied by stochastic thermodynamics. In current work, we study this…
Cilia and flagella are essential building blocks for biological fluid transport and locomotion at the micron scale. They often beat in synchrony and may transition between different synchronization modes in the same cell type. Here, we…
Contact inhibition plays a crucial role in the motility of cells, the process of wound healing, and the formation of tumors. By mimicking the mechanical motion of calls crawling on a substrate using a pseudopod, we constructed a minimal…
Cell alignment often forms nematic order, which can lead to anomalous collective cell flow due to the so-called active force. Although it is appreciated that cell migration is driven by traction force, a quantitative evaluation of the…
We have used numerical simulations to investigate how the properties of motor proteins control the dynamical behavior of a driven flexible filament. The filament is pinned at one end and positioned on top of a patch of anchored motor…
The ability of many living systems to actively self-propel underlies critical biomedical, environmental, and industrial processes. While such active transport is well-studied in uniform settings, environmental complexities such as geometric…
We investigate the dependence of the displacements of a molecular motor embedded inside a glassy material on its folding characteristic time. We observe two different time regimes. For slow foldings (regime I) the diffusion evolves very…