Related papers: Ciliary contact interactions dominate surface scat…
Deformable boundaries are omnipresent in the habitats of swimming microorganisms, leading to intricate hydroelastic couplings. Employing a perturbation theory, valid for small deformations, we study the swimming dynamics of pushers and…
Bacteria commonly live in structured communities that affect human health and influence ecological systems. Heterogeneous populations, such as motile and non-motile populations, often coexist in bacteria communities. Motile subpopulations…
Mechanical forces influence the development and behavior of biological tissues. In many situations these forces are exerted or resisted by elastic compliant structures such as the own-tissue cellular matrix or other surrounding tissues.…
Bacteria predate plants and animals by billions of years. Today, they are the world's smallest cells yet they represent the bulk of the world's biomass, and the main reservoir of nutrients for higher organisms. Most bacteria can move on…
Flagellated microswimmers are ubiquitous in natural habitats. Understanding the hydrodynamic behavior of these cells is of paramount interest, owing to their applications in bio-medical engineering and disease spreading. Since the last two…
Living creatures exhibit a remarkable diversity of locomotion mechanisms, evolving structures specialised for interacting with their environment. In the vast majority of cases, locomotor behaviours such as flying, crawling, and running, are…
Flagellated bacteria on nutrient-rich substrates can differentiate into a swarming state and move in dense swarms across surfaces. A recent experiment measured the flow in the fluid around an Escherichia coli swarm (Wu, Hosu and Berg, 2011…
Non-equilibrium processes which convert chemical energy into mechanical motion enable the motility of organisms. Bundles of inextensible filaments driven by energy transduction of molecular motors form essential components of micron-scale…
Ciliary flows are generated by a vast array of eukaryotic organisms, from unicellular algae to mammals, and occur in a range of different geometrical configurations. We employ a point torque -- or `rotlet' -- model to capture the…
The hydrodynamics of a flagellated microorganism is investigated when swimming close to a planar free-slip surface by means of numerical solu- tions of the Stokes equations obtained via a Boundary Element Method. Depending on the initial…
Self-propulsion of cellular microswimmers generates flow signatures, commonly classified as pusher- and puller-type, which characterize hydrodynamic interactions with other cells or boundaries. Using experimentally measured beat patterns,…
The time dynamics of flagellar and ciliary beating is often neglected in theories of microswimmers, with the most common models prescribing a time-constant actuation of the surrounding fluid. By explicitly introducing a metachronal wave,…
Synchronization induced by long-range hydrodynamic interactions is attracting attention as a candidate mechanism behind coordinated beating of cilia and flagella. Here we consider a minimal model of hydrodynamic synchronization in the low…
In natural environments, solid surfaces present both opportunities and challenges for bacteria. On one hand, they serve as platforms for biofilm formation, crucial for bacterial colonization and resilience in harsh conditions. On the other…
Flagella allow eukaryotic cells to move and pump fluid. We present the first three-dimensional, time-resolved imaging of the flagellar waveform of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a model alga found in fresh water. During the power stroke, we…
To mimic the mechanical response of passive biological cilia in complex fluids, we study the bending dynamics of an anchored elastic fiber submitted to a dilute granular suspension under shear. We show that the bending fluctuations of the…
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…
Ciliated microswimmers and flagellated bacteria alter their swimming trajectories to follow the direction of an applied electric field exhibiting electrotaxis. Both for matters of application and physical modelling, it is instructive to…
Eukaryotic flagella are active structures with a complex architecture of microtubules, motor proteins and elastic links. They are capable of whiplike motions driven by motors sliding along filaments that are themselves constrained at an…
Particles that are immersed in a fluid exchange momentum via the fluid, hence their Brownian motion is correlated. By means of multiparticle-collision dynamics simulations we study the interactions between two colloidal beads in a sheared…