Related papers: Dissipative Shocks behind Bacteria Gliding
We report a novel form of convection in suspensions of the bioluminiscent marine bacterium $Photobacterium~phosphoreum$. Suspensions of these bacteria placed in a chamber open to the air create persistent luminiscent plumes most easily…
Myxococcus xanthus is a model organism for studying bacterial social behaviors due to its ability to form complex multi-cellular structures. Knowledge of M. xanthus surface gliding motility and the mechanisms that coordinate it are…
Dispersal is essential to the plethora of motile microorganisms living in porous environments, yet how it relates to movement patterns and pore space structure remains largely unknown. Here we investigate numerically the long-time dispersal…
Synthetic bio-molecular spiders with "legs" made of single-stranded segments of DNA can move on a surface covered by single-stranded segments of DNA called substrates when the substrate DNA is complementary to the leg DNA. If the motion of…
The motion of flexible fibers through structured fluidic environments is ubiquitous in nature and industrial applications. Most often, their dynamics results from the complex interplay between internal elastic stresses, contact forces and…
Anisotropically wetting substrates enable useful control of droplet behavior across a range of applications. Usually, these involve chemically or physically patterning the substrate surface, or applying gradients in properties like…
We show that the recent experimental observation of the rectification of swimming bacteria in a system with an array of asymmetric barriers occurs due to the ballistic component of the bacteria trajectories introduced by the bacterial…
The motion of a block slipping on a surface is a well studied problem for flat and circular surfaces, but the necessary conditions for the block to leave (or not) the surface deserve a detailed treatment. In this article, using basic…
Escherichia coli and other bacteria use rotating helical filaments to swim. Each cell typically has about four filaments, which bundle or disperse depending on the sense of motor rotation. To study the bundling process, we built a…
The leaves of many plants are superhydrophobic, a property that may have evolved to clean the leaves by encouraging water droplets to bead up and roll off. Superhydrophobic surfaces can also exhibit reduced friction and liquids flowing over…
In this article a kinetic model for the dynamics of myxobacteria colonies on flat surfaces is investigated. The model is based on the kinetic equation for collective bacteria dynamics introduced in arXiv:2001.02711, which is based on the…
The surface tension of partially wetting droplets deforms soft substrates. These deformations are usually localized to a narrow region near the contact line, forming a so-called `elastocapillary ridge.' When a droplet slides along a…
The experiments of Leptos et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 198103 (2009)] show that the displacements of small particles affected by swimming microorganisms achieve a non-Gaussian distribution, which nevertheless scales diffusively -- the…
The mechanics of crawling cells on a substrate is investigated by using a minimal model that satisfies the force-free condition. A cell is described by two subcellular elements connected by a linear actuator that changes the length of the…
Active matter exhibits various forms of non-equilibrium states in the absence of external forcing, including macroscopic steady-state currents. Such states are often too complex to be modelled from first principles and our understanding of…
On perfectly vertical surfaces, rolling is conventionally deemed impossible without external torque. While various species like geckos and spiders exhibit vertical locomotion, they cannot achieve rolling; instead, they fall. In this study,…
We discuss the stick-slip motion of an elastic block sliding along a rigid substrate. We argue that for a given external shear stress this system shows a discontinuous nonequilibrium transition from a uniform stick state to uniform sliding…
Transport at small scales is classically understood within an equilibrium framework, where dispersion theory successfully describes shear-enhanced diffusion for passive particles in the continuum limit. However, as most bacteria can move on…
Bacterial contamination of biological conducts, catheters or water resources is a major threat to public health and can be amplified by the ability of bacteria to swim upstream. The mechanisms of this rheotaxis, the reorientation with…
The swimming properties of an E. coli-type model bacterium are investigated by mesoscale hy- drodynamic simulations, combining molecular dynamics simulations of the bacterium with the multiparticle particle collision dynamics method for the…