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Motile cilia are a striking example of functional cellular organelle, conserved across all the eukaryotic species. Motile cilia allow swimming of cells and small organisms and transport of liquids across epithelial tissues. Whilst the…
Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion to the mechanical properties of the environment in which they find themselves--crawling in some environments while swimming in others. The latter can involve…
Swimming cells and microorganisms must often move though complex fluids that contain an immersed microstructure such as polymer molecules, or filaments. In many important biological processes, such as mammalian reproduction and bacterial…
Microalgae have been shown as a potential bioresource for food, biofuel, and pharmaceutical products. During the growth phases with corresponding environmental conditions, microalgae accumulate different amounts of various metabolites. We…
Cell deformability is an essential determinant for tissue-scale mechanical nature, such as fluidity and rigidity, and is thus crucial for understanding tissue homeostasis and stable developmental processes. However, numerical simulations…
Microorganisms such as bacteria often swim in fluid environments that cannot be classified as Newtonian. Many biological fluids contain polymers or other heterogeneities which may yield complex rheology. For a given set of boundary…
Microscopic active droplets are able to swim autonomously in viscous flows: this puzzling feature stems from solute exchanges with the surrounding fluid via surface reactions or their spontaneous solubilisation, and the interfacial flows…
Droplet formation has emerged as an essential concept for the spatiotemporal organisation of biomolecules in cells. However, classical descriptions of droplet dynamics based on passive liquid-liquid phase separation cannot capture the…
Collective cellular movement plays a crucial role in many processes fundamental to health, including development, reproduction, infection, wound healing, and cancer. The emergent dynamics that arise in these systems are typically thought to…
Run-and-tumble (RT) motion is commonly observed in flagellated microswimmers, arising from synchronous and asynchronous flagellar beating. One such example is a biflagellated alga, called \textit{Chlamydomonas reinhardtii}. Its flagellar…
We measure different contributions to entropy production in a living functional epithelial tissue. We do this by extracting the functional dynamics of development while at the same time quantifying fluctuations. Using the translucent…
We introduce a generic, purely mechanical model for environment sensitive motion of mammalian cells that is applicable to chemotaxis, haptotaxis, and durotaxis as modes of motility. It is able to theoretically explain all relevant…
The biological fluids encountered by self-propelled cells display complex microstructures and rheology. We consider here the general problem of low-Reynolds number locomotion in a complex fluid. {Building on classical work on the transport…
The need for organisms to regulate their volume and osmolarity when surrounded by freshwater is a basic physical challenge for many bacteria, protists and algae. Taking inspiration from the contractile vacuole complex found in many…
Motivated by recent advances in vesicle engineering, we consider theoretically the locomotion of shape-changing bilayer vesicles at low Reynolds number. By modulating their volume and membrane composition, the vesicles can be made to change…
Hybrid models of chemotaxis combine agent-based models of cells with partial differential equation models of extracellular chemical signals. In this paper, travelling wave properties of hybrid models of bacterial chemotaxis are…
The processes of morphogenesis that give rise to the shapes of organs and organisms during development are often driven by mechanical instabilities. Can such mechanical bifurcations also drive or constrain the evolution of these processes…
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…
Filamentous cyanobacteria, forming long strands of connected cells, are one of the earliest and most successful forms of life on Earth. They exhibit self-organised behaviour, forming large-scale patterns in structures like biomats and…
The extent to which biological interfaces affect the dynamics of water plays a key role in the exchange of matter and chemical interactions that are essential for life. The density and the mobility of water molecules depend on their…