Related papers: Optimality of contraction-driven crawling
Swarming or collective motion of living entities is one of the most common and spectacular manifestations of living systems having been extensively studied in recent years. A number of general principles have been established. The…
Active navigation in disordered media depends on a biased random walk interacting with environmental constraints. Using E. coli chemotactic navigation in agar gels as a model system, we reveal a fundamental trade-off between diffusive…
We present a physical model for turbulent friction on rough surfaces with regularly distributed roughness elements. Wall shear stresses are expressed as functions of physical quantities. Surfaces with varying roughness densities and…
In this work, a mathematical model of self-oscillatory dynamics of the metabolism in a cell is studied. The full phase-parametric characteristics of variations of the form of attractors depending on the dissipation of a kinetic membrane…
We consider the influence of active speed fluctuations on the dynamics of a $d$-dimensional active Brownian particle performing a persistent stochastic motion. We use the Laplace transform of the Fokker-Planck equation to obtain exact…
We study a statistical model describing the steady state distribution of the fluxes in a metabolic network. The resulting model on continuous variables can be solved by the cavity method. In particular analytical tractability is possible…
The balance between stretching and bending deformations characterizes shape transitions of thin elastic sheets. While stretching dominates the mechanical response in tension, bending dominates in compression after an abrupt buckling…
Minimising the energy consumption associated with periodic motion is a priority common to a wide range of technologies and organisms - among them, many species of flying insect, for which flapping-wing flight is a life-essential mode of…
We study a minimal model of a crawling eukaryotic cell with a chemical polarity controlled by a reaction-diffusion mechanism describing Rho GTPase dynamics. The size, shape, and speed of the cell emerge from the combination of the chemical…
The behaviour and fate of tissue cells is controlled by the rigidity and geometry of their adhesive environment, possibly through forces localized to sites of adhesion. We introduce a mechanical model that predicts cellular force…
We consider active Brownian particles that intermittently switch between active and inactive states. Such behavior is ubiquitous at all scales, from bacteria to animals and in artificial active systems. We derive exact expressions for key…
Biological adhesion is a critical mechanical function of complex organisms operating at multiple scales. At the cellular scale, cell-cell adhesion is remarkably tunable to enable both cohesion and malleability during development,…
Substrate-based cell motility is essential for fundamental biological processes, such as tissue growth, wound healing and immune response. Even if a comprehensive understanding of this motility mode remains elusive, progress has been…
The remarkable accuracy and versatility of single-molecule techniques make possible new measurements that are not feasible in bulk assays. Among these, the precise estimation of folding free energies using fluctuation theorems in…
Highly-optimized complex transport networks serve crucial functions in many man-made and natural systems such as power grids and plant or animal vasculature. Often, the relevant optimization functional is non-convex and characterized by…
Many organisms have an elastic skeleton that consists of a closed shell of epithelial cells that is filled with fluid, and can actively regulate both elastic forces in the shell and hydrostatic pressure inside it. In this work we introduce…
We study the distribution of swimming micro-organisms advected by a model turbulent flow and attracted towards a localised light source through phototaxis. It is shown that particles aggregate along a dynamical attractor with fractal…
Epithelial cell layers on soft elastic substrates or pillar arrays are commonly used as model systems for investigating the role of force in tissue growth, maintenance and repair. Here we show analytically that the experimentally observed…
Animal cells can sense chemical gradients without moving, and are faced with the challenge of migrating towards a target despite noisy information on the target position. Here we discuss optimal search strategies for a chaser that moves by…
The migration of active particles in slowly moving, crowded, and heterogeneous media is fundamental to various biological processes and technological applications, such as cargo transport. In this study, we numerically investigate the…