Related papers: Ciliary contact interactions dominate surface scat…

Hypothesis: Bacterial contamination of surfaces poses a major threat to public health. Designing effective antibacterial or self-cleaning surfaces requires understanding how bacteria-laden droplets interact with solid substrates and how…

Biological microswimmers such as bacteria and sperm cells often encounter complex biological fluid environments. Here we use the well-known squirmer microswimmer model to show the importance of the local fluid microstructure and…

Bacterial swimming is well characterized in uniform liquids at rest. The natural habitat of bacterial swimmers, however, is often dominated by moving fluids and interfaces, resulting in shear flows that may strongly alter bacterial…

Many biological microswimmers locomote by periodically beating the densely-packed cilia on their cell surface in a wave-like fashion. While the swimming mechanisms of ciliated microswimmers have been extensively studied both from the…

Unicellular microscopic organisms living in aqueous environments outnumber all other creatures on Earth. A large proportion of them are able to self-propel in fluids with a vast diversity of swimming gaits and motility patterns. In this…

Coordinated cilia are used throughout the natural world for micronscale fluid transport. They are often modelled with regular filament arrays on fixed, planar surfaces. Here, we simulate hundreds of interacting active filaments on spherical…

Geometric confinement plays an important role in the dynamics of natural and synthetic microswimmers from bacterial cells to self-propelled particles in high-throughput microfluidic devices. However, little is known about the effects of…

Controlling and suppressing bacterial accumulation at solid surfaces is essential for preventing biofilm formation and biofouling. Whereas various chemical surface treatments are known to reduce cell accumulation and attachment, the role of…

Cilia and flagella are self-actuated microtubule-based structures that are present on many cell surfaces, ranging from the outer surface of single-cell organisms to the internal epithelial surfaces in larger animals. A fast and robust…

Shear thickening is a widespread phenomenon in suspension flow that, despite sustained study, is still the subject of much debate. The longstanding view that shear thickening is due to hydrodynamic clusters has been challenged by recent…

Swimming microorganisms can influence the diffusion of passive particles. The effect of this swimmer-particle interaction depends on different properties, such as the hydrodynamic field of the swimmer and the relative sizes of…

While hydrodynamic coupling has long been considered essential for synchronisation of eukaryotic flagella, recent experiments on the unicellular biflagellate model organism {\it Chlamydomonas} demonstrate that -- at the single cell level --…

Understanding interactions between chiral active particles -- self-propelling and self-rotating entities -- is crucial for uncovering how chiral active matter self-organizes into dynamic structures. Although fluctuation-induced forces in…

Can topography be used to control bacteria accumulation? We address this question in the model system of smooth-swimming and run-and-tumble \textit{Escherichia coli} swimming near a sinusoidal surface, and show that the accumulation of…

Locomotion and transport of microorganisms in fluids is an essential aspect of life. Search for food, orientation toward light, spreading of off-spring, and the formation of colonies are only possible due to locomotion. Swimming at the…

This study systematically investigates the dynamics of the bacterial transition from free-swimming to surface adhesion, a process characterized by both height $h$ and inclination angle $\Psi$. The surface entrapment process is divided into…

Active propulsion, as performed by bacteria and Janus particles, in combination with hydrodynamic interaction results in the accumulation of bacteria at a flat wall. However, in microfluidic devices with cylindrical pillars of sufficiently…

Communities of swimming microorganisms often thrive near liquid-air interfaces. We study how such `active carpets' shape their aquatic environment by driving biogenic transport in the water column beneath them. The hydrodynamic stirring…

Active swimmers are ubiquitous in nature, found in many diverse biological systems ranging from bacteria to vertebrate fish. Of particular importance are sperm cells which are swimmers that are crucial for the survival of many species…

Eukaryotic cell motility is crucial during development, wound healing, the immune response, and cancer metastasis. Some eukaryotic cells can swim, but cells more commonly adhere to and crawl along the extracellular matrix. We study the…