Related papers: Maximum velocity of self-propulsion for an active …
We study the asymptotic behaviour of a family of dynamic models of crawling locomotion, with the aim of characterizing a gait as a limit property. The locomotors, which might have a discrete or continuous body, move on a line with a…
Animal cells form contractile structures to promote various functions, from cell motility to cell division. Force generation in these structures is often due to molecular motors such as myosin that require polar substrates for their…
We study a lattice gas of persistent walkers, in which each site is occupied by at most one particle and the direction each particle attempts to move to depends on its last step. We analyse the mean squared displacement (MSD) of the…
The main purpose of this work is the mathematical modelling of large populations of cells under different deterministic interactions among themselves, in balance with naturally random diffusion. We focus on cell-cell adhesion mechanisms for…
A number of biological processes, such as embryo development, cancer metastasis or wound healing, rely on cells moving in concert. The mechanisms leading to the emergence of coordinated motion remain however largely unexplored. Although…
We present a Brownian inchworm model of a self-propelled elastic dimer in the absence of an external potential. Nonequilibrium noise together with a stretch-dependent damping form the propulsion mechanism. Our model connects three key…
Depending on their mechanism of self-propulsion, active particles can exhibit a time-dependent, often periodic, propulsion velocity. The precise propulsion velocity profile determines their mean square displacement and their effective…
Soft robots offer a frontier in robotics with enormous potential for safe human-robot interaction and agility in uncertain environments. A stepping stone towards unlocking their potential is a control theory tailored to soft robotics,…
Cell migration in morphogenesis and cancer metastasis typically involves interplay between different cell types. We construct and study a minimal, one-dimensional model comprised of two different motile cells with each cell represented as…
Anchorage-dependent cells collect information on the mechanical properties of the environment through their contractile machineries and use this information to position and orient themselves. Since the probing process is anisotropic,…
Cell migration in fibreous extracellular matrix (ECM) is crucial to many physiological and pathological processes such as tissue regeneration, immune response and cancer progression. During migration, individual cells can generate active…
Cell crawling on flat substrates is based on intracellular flows of the actin cytoskeleton that are driven by both actin polymerization at the front and myosin contractility at the back. The new experimental tool of optogenetics makes it…
Active fluids, such as cytoskeletal filaments, bacterial colonies and epithelial cell layers, exhibit distinctive orientational coherence, often characterized by nematic order and topological defects. By contrast, little is known about…
How the cells break symmetry and organize their edge activity to move directionally is a fun- damental question in cell biology. Physical models of cell motility commonly rely on gradients of regulatory factors and/or feedback from the…
The internal dynamics of active gels, both in artificial (in-vitro) model systems and inside the cytoskeleton of living cells, has been extensively studied by experiments of recent years. These dynamics are probed using tracer particles…
Wing flexibility governs the flying performance of flapping wing flyers. Here, we use a self-propelled flapping-wing model mounted on a ``merry go round'' to investigate the effect of wing compliance on the propulsive efficiency of the…
Active transport of biomolecules assisted by motor proteins is imperative for the proper functioning of cellular activities. Inspired by the diffusion of active agents in crowded cellular channels, we computationally investigate the…
Micro-robots for, e.g., biomedical applications, need to be equipped with motility strategies that enable them to navigate through complex environments. Inspired by biological microorganisms we recreate motility patterns such as…
With the aim of providing a first step in the quest for a reduction of the aerodynamic drag on the rear-end of a car, we study the phenomena of separation and reattachment of an incompressible flow focusing on a specific aerodynamic…
Quantifying the outcomes of cells collisions is a crucial step in building the foundations of a kinetic theory of living matter. Here, we develop a mechanical theory of such collisions by first representing individual cells as extended…