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The chemotaxis pathway in the bacterium Escherichia coli allows cells to detect changes in external ligand concentration (e.g. nutrients). The pathway regulates the flagellated rotary motors and hence the cells' swimming behaviour, steering…
Bacterial processes ranging from gene expression to motility and biofilm formation are constantly challenged by internal and external noise. While the importance of stochastic fluctuations has been appreciated for chemotaxis, it is…
Vibrio cholerae is a globally distributed water-borne pathogen that causes severe diarrheal disease and mortality, with current outbreaks as part of the seventh pandemic. Further understanding of the role of environmental factors in…
Mechanical forces are obviously important in the assembly of three-dimensional multicellular structures, but their detailed role is often unclear. We have used growing microcolonies of the bacterium \emph{Escherichia coli} to investigate…
Through modelling and simulations we show that material instabilities play a dominant role in the mechanical behavior of the fibrous collagen Extracellular Matrix (ECM), as observed when the ECM is deformed by contractile biological cells.…
Diverse processes--e.g. bioremediation, biofertilization, and microbial drug delivery--rely on bacterial migration in disordered, three-dimensional (3D) porous media. However, how pore-scale confinement alters bacterial motility is unknown…
Early detection and identification of pathogenic bacteria such as Escherichia coli (E. coli) is an essential task for public health. The conventional culture-based methods for bacterial colony detection usually take >24 hours to get the…
Suspensions of swimming bacteria interact hydrodynamically over long ranges, organizing themselves into collective states that drive large-scale chaotic flows, often referred to as "bacterial turbulence". Despite extensive experimental and…
Escherichia coli is a motile bacterium that moves up a chemoattractant gradient by performing a biased random walk composed of alternating runs and tumbles. This paper presents calculations of the chemotactic drift velocity vd (the mean…
This study introduces an advanced multiphysics and multiscale modeling approach to investigate intestinal motility. We propose a generalized electromechanical framework that incorporates contact mechanics, enabling the development of a…
Motility is a fundamental survival strategy of bacteria to navigate porous environments. Swimming cells thrive in quiescent wetlands and sediments at the bottom of the marine water column, where they mediate many essential biogeochemical…
To swim through a viscous fluid, a flagellated bacterium must overcome the fluid drag on its body by rotating a flagellum or a bundle of multiple flagella. Because the drag increases with the size of bacteria, it is expected theoretically…
Understanding cell-fate decisions during tumorigenesis and metastasis is a major challenge in modern cancer biology. One canonical cell-fate decision that cancer cells undergo is Epithelial-to-Mesenchymal Transition (EMT) and its reverse…
Background: The Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition (EMT) endows epithelial-looking cells with enhanced migratory ability during embryonic development and tissue repair. EMT can also be co-opted by cancer cells to acquire metastatic potential…
The motility of many parasites is critical for the infection process of their host, as exemplified by the transmission cycle of the blood fluke Schistosoma mansoni. In their human infectious stage, immature, submillimetre-scale forms of the…
We have investigated the growth of Escherichia coli E.coli, a mesophilic bacterium, as a function of pressure $P$ and temperature $T$. E.coli can grow and divide in a wide range of pressure (1-400atm) and temperature ($23-40^{\circ}$C). For…
In processes such as embryo shaping, wound healing, and malignant cell invasion, epithelial cells transition between dispersed phases, where the cells move independently, and condensed phases, where they aggregate and deform to close gaps,…
Fast Repetition Rate fluorometry (FRRf) generates high-resolution measures of phytoplankton primary productivity as electron transport rates (ETRs). How ETRs scale to corresponding inorganic carbon (C) uptake rates (the so-called electron…
Collective cell migration is essential for a wide range of biological processes such as: morphogenesis, wound healing, and cancer spreading. However, it is well known that migrating epithelial collectives frequently undergo jamming, stay…
In the presence of gratuitous inducers, the lac operon of Escherichia coli exhibits bistability. Most models in the literature assume that the inducer enters the cell via the carrier (permease), and exits by a diffusion-like process. The…